Introduction
When I was pursuing my PhD we lived and worked under the mantra publish or perish. However, like most of us after joining a company most of my technical achievements and concepts are firewalled by the company as it deems it commercially relevant. Only if you are very lucky and work on a project that requires the company to do public disseminations will you be allowed to publish anything. Alternately if you were able to file a disclosure for your invention which is now available in public domain then you can use that to highlight your achievements. This arrangement works in favour of the company that employs you but is quite disadvantageous to us (except for the pay package of course).
In the increasingly competitive world today, being able to showcase your talent to future employers is the key to moving up the career ladder. But one does not need to wait for publication of a journal article or a patent. There are many small projects or analysis that can be publically disclosed simply because it may be well known in the industry or that it is not of much commercial significance. A word of caution though, there sometimes is a fine line between what can be published online and what is a company propritery material and knowledge. A best practice perhaps is to only publish material which are relatively well published in literature but perhaps there is no public source codes or simulations available. This then adds to the overall open source material and everyone wins !
It used to be that most technical blogging was in the domain of people more familiar with coding like web-designers, application developers, devOps, AI engineers etc. But increasingly it has slowly started to influence traditional domains as well like mechanical, civil and electrical engineering. There is far more non-paywalled content in the internet on coding than there is for say electrical machine design to take an example.
Why Blog ?
Blogging is a great way to enhance your technical credibility and can help you grow your professional network. I recently saw on linkedin, a person blogged about some very basic codes on how to plot DQ transforms which is a common mathematical transform used in electrical engineering. I was surprised to see that post had so many comments and reactions. It undoubtedly helped the person grow his professional network.
A professional blog will also help you to organise and explain the technology and will help you improve your writing skills. Technical writing skill is something every PhD student needs to master in order to succeed. However, outside of academics it is difficult to keep these skills honed and i have seens lots of poorly written technical reports undoubtedly because the writer has lost the art of technical writing.
Roadblocks to blogging
There are many reasons why engineers from traditional engineering branches do not blog. But here are few that came to my mind.
- Topic is trivial, why bother ?
- Someone must have already written about it !
- How do i even get started ?
I want to address these issues here and show you how one can get started without breaking a sweat.
Topic is trivial
This is an interesting one1. How many times have we searched the web for what seems to be a trivial issue and thinking surely someone must have worked it out only to realise after an hour of frantic searching and going up dead-ends that what we thought was trivial and relatively straight forward is super convoluted and not trivial at all. We have all been there !
Trivial therefore is relative. What is probably trivial to the web-developer of this blog template is probably not at all trivial to you and me and vice-versa. More over, even if you think it might be trivial, the fact that you spent an hour of your time researching the matter is surely worth documenting, even if its just for yourself. There has been so many occasions when I have spent hours solving something and then not writing about it, only to need it again in a few years time and having to re-invent the wheel all over again. Write it for yourself if not for anyone else.
Someone must have written about it
Sure, if someone has written a good article about it, it does no harm to write a short blurb and cross-reference the good article. More references to the article meeans its shows up higher on the search results (google page rank algorithm).
How do I even get started
This is usually the tripping point. Most people think that writing a blog would mean learning HTML, CSS and other web technologies. In fact I have gone through that as well. Lots of time I would pick up enthusiastically the baton and do some research, browse w3 technologies website, make a template, search stack-overflow for answers to problems of formatting etc and then as other work pressure piles up, leave the blog in a semi-finished state. It has happened to me too many times. I blame it on the fact that I am not a full time coding guru and like everything I dont want to be learning a new language, I just want to start writing.
However, over the last decade, lots of static web-site generators have matured to a point where even I can install it relatively easily and start to blog.
What is a static web generator, anyhow ?
Glad you asked. Well like the name suggests the software converts your documents to web page that can then be uploaded to a web-host. The generated web-site does not support server-side scripting which make a web-page ‘Dynamic’. Most static web site generators allow user to write in Markdown which is a text document and it then converts that to a beautiful blog just by running some scripts (like magic!).
Some of you may be familiar with technical typesetting software Latex. I wrote my master’s thesis in 2006 using Latex and although there is some initial learning curve involved, once you have mastered the basics, writing well formatted equations in Latex was so much easier than doing the same in word 2003. Using the static website generators is much like using latex except that the end result is a web-page and not a pdf. In fact in future posts I will show how to convert your latex files into a web-page using another software called pan-doc.
The process has now become so easy that, non-experts such as myself can just focus writing the content and the formatting is taken care off by the software.
How do I get Started
In future posts I will be showing how to setup a static web-site generator Jekyll and how you can customise it for equations etc needed to write a good technical blog. Stay tuned !
Conclusion
Its not late to start to write a technical blog, I am here to help you get started and make this process as pain free as possible.