This morning, I was going through my RSS reader. In one of the programming feeds that I read, I read two different articles both of which were talking about Git.
Each were talking about something that has been discussed I don’t know how many times over in the past by someone else:
- Should dependencies be kept in Git or now?
- And an outline of Git branching strategies.
It’s easy to look at posts like this – just like I can look at stuff I’ve written and realize it’s been discussed by someone else or you can look at stuff that you’ve written and find something similar has been written by someone else – and want to dismiss them.
That’s not the best way to think about publishing practical technical content, though. Even though someone else has likely already written your blog post, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth writing.
- You have a different audience than whoever you’ve come across. And although you may be reading something similar to what you’ve read or written, that doesn’t mean that whoever reads your site is reading those sites.
- Writing for others is important, but it may be just as important if not more important than writing for yourself. Distilling your ideas into something that you can explain is incredibly helpful in making sure you solidify the information you’ve learned.
- Writing something this year can be different than writing something a few years ago (and will be different in writing it in the future). The economy and environment changes fast.
- The context in which you’re sharing knowledge and explaining your ideas may be similar, but not exactly the same, as someone else.
The next time you attempt to write about something and are skeptical if you should hit publish or not, go ahead and hit publish. At best, you’re helping yourself and maybe someone else will come across what you’ve shared; at worst, you’re sharing something someone else has shared but it’s unique to what they do.
And since similar isn’t the same as unique, the value of publishing what you have to say is greater than not.
