Great article, and very true in my experience. One of my favorite, unexpected benefits of blogging is it's like a time-machine/memory dump for your brain.
Here's what I mean. When you're thinking about a problem, you struggle, and struggle, then find some insight. When you go to sleep that insight might be gone. So you write it down, ideally in the shortest, most vivid language that can recreate the idea in your head: I serialize my mental RAM into words, and at a later date, reload that information into my head.
If I wrote well, the deserialization is fast (few minutes) and my head is back into the mental state when I "got it". Then I can continue working, add some new insights, then serialize that new state back into words (a follow-up post, or adding to the original).
Over time, you develop some deep insights which are the result of several "me"s collaborating on the problem. I know that college-me understood class XYZ really well, and because he wrote down some insights, 10-years-after-college me can reload that memory very quickly, and maybe add something new. It's like having a perfect tutor (you, when you got it) jump into your head and bring you up to speed. I don't remember vector calculus very well, but I can deserialize my notes and in a few minutes be 80-90% up to speed.
This was a hugely unexpected benefit to blogging which I hadn't even considered. And incidentally, if you write in a way that deserializes well for you, it will likely be useful for many other people too.
tl;dr: create a standard library of thought snippets so you can #include "vectorcalculus.h"
One of my favorite, unexpected benefits of blogging is it's like a time-machine/memory dump for your brain.
I've had this experience too, albeit not in a coding sense. I will say, however, that I use Devonthink Pro according to Steven Berlin Johnson's scheme: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002... to archive my own posts, as well as other quotes, writing, and so forth, and DTP's "see also" algorithms often find material I wrote years ago but that's relevant to what I'm doing now. It helps me get to this: "Over time, you develop some deep insights which are the result of several "me"s collaborating on the problem."
Really interesting. I use Notational Velocity to keep track of text snippets, but it doesn't have the "see also" feature. I imagine it could be very useful.
I agree with you wholeheartedly about the benefit of this, it's much more than anyone might think beforehand.
I do a very similar thing, although not to a blog. I have a file (notes.txt) in my home directory. Any problem or thought gets cat'ed to the file ( cat >> notes.txt ) and I type my thoughts along with a few keywords. A simple grep finds any of it.
It is extremely useful once you've built up a body of knowledge. Mine is almost 10,000 lines now.
N.B. If using bash or similar, "set -C" to prevent overwrites with a mistyped > instead of >> (which can be overridden with >| if you need to).
thoughts.txt - random musings about life
ideas.txt - startup ideas, etc.
quotes.txt - favorite quotes
feelgood.txt - events / activities I really enjoyed [good to see what makes you happy in the moment]
Here's what I mean. When you're thinking about a problem, you struggle, and struggle, then find some insight. When you go to sleep that insight might be gone. So you write it down, ideally in the shortest, most vivid language that can recreate the idea in your head: I serialize my mental RAM into words, and at a later date, reload that information into my head.
If I wrote well, the deserialization is fast (few minutes) and my head is back into the mental state when I "got it". Then I can continue working, add some new insights, then serialize that new state back into words (a follow-up post, or adding to the original).
Over time, you develop some deep insights which are the result of several "me"s collaborating on the problem. I know that college-me understood class XYZ really well, and because he wrote down some insights, 10-years-after-college me can reload that memory very quickly, and maybe add something new. It's like having a perfect tutor (you, when you got it) jump into your head and bring you up to speed. I don't remember vector calculus very well, but I can deserialize my notes and in a few minutes be 80-90% up to speed.
This was a hugely unexpected benefit to blogging which I hadn't even considered. And incidentally, if you write in a way that deserializes well for you, it will likely be useful for many other people too.
tl;dr: create a standard library of thought snippets so you can #include "vectorcalculus.h"