I decided to start this blog after listening to an episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast, where Julia Evans talked about some of her experiences at New York City’s Hacker School. During her residency, she blogged about her projects and what she was learning from them. Both Julia and the show’s hosts remarked on how this practice is helpful as it:

a) Forces you to put something you’ve learned into prose form, thus reviewing it and also making sure you understand it fully.

b) Serves as a record that will be useful when you inevitably forget what you learned and need to do it sometime later.

After spending months doing what can pretty much described as “Error Driven Development” while building Freshist, I have learned how to do a ton of stuff but sometimes find myself pouring over suspiciously familiar Stack Overflow answers and pages in the Rails API docs. Even though I’m unlikely to be able to make a daily habit out of it, I think this is something I will benefit greatly from. I’m really looking forward to the first time one of my blog posts shows up in the search results next time I’m tracking down a solution to something.