It is 2026 and I still have a blog. Not because it is cool. Not because it is trendy. Blogging stopped being fashionable years ago. I keep writing because it is one of the best ways I know to actually learn things.
Writing forces you to understand
There is a difference between thinking you understand something and being able to explain it. Writing a blog post exposes that gap ruthlessly. You sit down to describe a technique you used last week and suddenly realise there are parts you glossed over. You thought you understood them. You did not.
So you go back. You dig into the details. You try it again, this time paying attention to the parts you skipped. You search, you read, you experiment. By the time the post is done, you understand the topic far better than when you started. The blog post is the artifact. The learning is the point.
Passive consumption is not learning
You can watch a hundred YouTube videos about a framework and still not be able to use it. You can sit through conference talks and nod along and leave with nothing that sticks. Watching someone else do something is not the same as doing it yourself.
Think about how a child learns to ride a bike. No amount of watching other kids ride will teach them balance. They have to get on, wobble, fall, and try again. Developers learn the same way. You need a problem, you need to struggle with it, and you need to work through it yourself.
Writing is active. It forces you to organise your thoughts, choose what matters, and express it clearly. That process is where the learning happens.
Baby steps and struggle
When I face a new problem, I usually search the net and find a blog post that almost solves my problem. Then I dive in. I copy the example, dissect it, change one thing and see what happens. Baby steps. Too many changes at once and I lose track of what I expected to change.
After enough fiddling, the pieces start to fall into place. Sometimes the solution clicks all at once. More often it is gradual. Either way, the struggle is where the learning lives.
Writing a blog post follows the same pattern. You start with a rough idea, you wrestle with it, you rearrange, you cut what does not work. It is the same baby-step process, just applied to words instead of code.
The right amount of difficulty
Learning happens just outside your comfort zone. If something is too easy, you do not learn. If it is too hard, you give up.
I failed a Prolog course at university in the late 1990s. The assignment itself was not too hard. But every example I found took too large a step, skipping over details that were obvious to the author and invisible to me. Every resource I found was essentially the same example, probably copied from the same origin. This was before Stack Overflow, before the wealth of resources we have today. I could not bridge the gap and there was no one to help me across it. It was the only course I started but never finished. Luckily, I did not need the credits to get my degree.
A good teacher works like a parent with a child learning to walk. Let them stumble, let them fall, but be there to catch them before real harm. Push them out of their comfort zone. Pull them back when needed. The student must be allowed to make mistakes, even when the teacher can see the problem from a distance.
Writing a blog post gives you that same productive struggle, with a safety net. You can take your time. You can rewrite. No one sees the messy drafts. The published post is the polished version of everything you worked through.
Why it works for me
I am not claiming that blogging is the only way to learn or that it works for everyone. But for me, and for at least some developers I have worked with, writing is a powerful way to turn shallow familiarity into real understanding.
When I look back at posts I wrote years ago, I can see exactly what I was learning at the time. The blog is a record of that journey. But more importantly, the act of writing each post was itself a step in the journey.
So yes, it is 2026 and I still blog. Not for the audience. Not for the metrics. I do not even have an analytics tool on this site. I have no idea how many people read these posts and I do not care. Because every post I write teaches me something I would not have learned otherwise.