Back in 2010, I wrote a post called “Why I blog“. All of the things I said six year ago are still true. This is still my personal KB, and I use it on a weekly basis for that very purpose. I was offered both of my last two jobs, in part due to this blog (having documented skills in written communication is literally never a bad thing for a support tech – or anyone filling any role in IT, for that matter), and I still enjoy my soapbox.
I am still very happy with running this as my own site, rather than being part of a collective. While I may not get anywhere near the same level of views as I might in a collective, that is not my focus. My focus is to have something that keeps me writing, and keeps me creative (and yes; even technical documentation falls into the bracket of creativity – word choices and sentence structure matter). I also enjoy the independence it gives me. I report only to myself (though I try to keep things transparent with my year in review-series.
The reason I wanted to revisit this point, is that I recently read something that made Kevin Spacey said:
If you have done well in whatever business you are in, it is your duty to send the elevator back down and try to help bring up the next generation of undiscovered talent.
More than anything else, that’s what it’s about. The world of IT is huge, and has interconnections every which way. As I have stated elsewhere, I subscribe to the hacker attitude, as defined by Eric Stephen Raymond. In particular, I agree with its second tenet: No problem should ever have to be solved twice. By documenting what I see, I help others. This is, to me, at the core of sending the elevator back down. Offer help for the sake of helping. Helping, I have found, is its own reward.
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