5. Write for Publications to Share Your Knowledge

This is the most time consuming for me. You don’t realise how hard it is to share your knowledge until you have to do it. It takes a lot of time to write something in an interesting way and to check it 100 times to be sure you are not sharing incorrect information. I want to be convinced it will please readers and that they’ll learn something.

I think it’s happened to many of us — getting stuck in a tutorial because there is one missing step or a bug that’s not covered. You came to learn one thing and now you have to try to fix something that shouldn’t be there in the first place. How frustrating.

I spend a lot of time making sure it will go smoothly for readers. In doing so, I almost always find there is one step that’s not clear enough.

For example, there might be ten lines in my project copy-pasted from StackOverflow and I’m not 100% assured of what it does (there’s no shame in that). Before I publish my project, I’ll understand it. If necessary, I’ll spend an hour or more on a line of code — until I’m confident I could explain it if someone was asking.

That’s a lot of work but I’m really happy when I publish something. I get even more happy and excited when someone claps something I wrote! The feeling you get when your piece has been useful to someone is better than a cup of coffee.

To get started, my advice would be to take your time. Publishing something unfinished won’t interest anyone — you won’t be proud of yourself. It would be sad to feel demotivated after your first publication, when you were so excited to publish it in the first place. Take your time, make sure you cover the topic in the title and make your piece interesting by giving sources, examples, and your own opinion.