Item — HN Reader

I think this essay best summarizes the benefits of starting a blog:

Personally, I’ve found 2 major benefits for publishing my essays:

1. Any time I encounter a problem, I write it down as an “essay idea”. Most of the time, I solve my problem without anything interesting to write about, but sometimes I have an “aha!” moment to analyze. People trick themselves into thinking they understand something, until they start writing. Deep writing makes it extremely clear when you have no idea what you’re talking about. And so the writing process helps me solve problems, and hopefully helps other benefits from my findings.

2. Conversations become more interesting IRL. When I go to parties, people who read my blog love hunting me down for follow-questions and ideas. And I sometimes get summoned into circles with “Oh, Taylor recently wrote an essay on this! Where is he? Call him over here!”

[2] https://taylor.town

> People trick themselves into thinking they understand something, until they start writing. Deep writing makes it extremely clear when you have no idea what you’re talking about.

This often actually stops me from writing. A short ways in, I realize I have no clue what's really going on. I start reading to learn more, then I either get discouraged by the complexity of it, have a crisis of confidence, or plain run out of time, and fail to ever come back to complete a post about that specific topic.

Regarding your first point - I once found the solution to a problem I had (I forgot what it was exactly) by starting to write a StackOverflow question. Similar to a blog post, this forces you to explain the problem to yourself first before explaining it to others, and that leads to better understanding.