#14 Always Share What You Learn
A common piece of advice you’ll hear when preparing for interviews is to build an online portfolio. This can include side projects (e.g., hosted on GitHub), a website highlighting your work experience, a polished resume, a LinkedIn profile, etc.
This advice helps you pass the “job search” phase by sharing what you already know. However, it can go beyond that. Whether you’re working full-time, part-time, or self-employed, sharing new things you’ve learned allows you to retain that new knowledge more effectively and build new connections along the way.
In this post, I’ll explain two reasons why you should always share your learnings.
I. Building The Puzzle
When you’re learning a new idea or concept, you collect pieces of information that form an incomplete puzzle. Depending on your interests, sometimes these pieces are good enough for a puzzle you don’t care much about, but other times you’ll want to fully complete it. Sharing what you’ve learned forces you to connect the dots, helping you complete that puzzle.
For example, I might focus on building a “Backend Eng.” puzzle for my own development, so I share something I’ve recently learned on that topic. Other times, I might have an incomplete “Frontend Eng.” puzzle that I’m happy with as is.
Sharing what you’ve learned forces you to pay attention to details and fill in any gaps in your knowledge. This process of “replaying the information” to yourself helps reinforce your learning and allows you to understand new concepts more effectively.
This can include new insights from articles, presentations, books, courses, and more. This is what it means to be a rich consumer — you’re absorbing new knowledge but haven’t yet applied it. In contrast, rich producers are those who actively share their learning with others.
Most of us are rich consumers, but few of us are rich producers.
Examples of rich producers are:
Writing technical blogs:
“How Authentication and Authorization work”
“Different Deployment Patterns”
Delivering a knowledge sharing session in your company:
“Python best practices”
“How to write better logs”
Sharing a new tool / technique with your team:
“How to use X for better observability”
“How to use Y for easier bug tracking”
Sharing notes
“Study notes from an online course”
“Highlights from a tech conference”
Aim to be both a rich producer and a rich consumer
II. Networking
Every time you share something you’ve learned with the public, you’re creating what I call a knowledge packet.
Knowledge packet: A long-lasting artifact that holds value for others to consume.
These can be code repositories, blog posts, guides, playbooks, videos, and more. The more knowledge packets you create, the more opportunities you open up to network with other professionals in your field.
Sharing what you learn connects you to a new network of rich producers!
Examples of knowledge packets are:
Open-source projects: If you encounter a specific development problem and can’t find a solution, why not code your own solution and open-source it for others? If your solution helps other developers, they might contribute back and recommend it to others!
Technical insights: If you discover a useful pattern that improves developer workflows, consider sharing a guide for your team. And if applicable, you can also share it with the broader tech community!
Examples of my recent knowledge packets are:
Connecting with an engineer from Palo Alto Networks over a 3-year-old post I wrote on semantic release on GitLab (link).
Connecting with a data scientist over an AWS workshop and sharing notes.
Conclusion
Sharing what you learn helps you focus on the details and build the puzzles you need.
Create Knowledge Packets that matter most to you.
Be a rich producer and a rich consumer.
A great way to expand your network is by sharing your Knowledge Packets!
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Unless something is bound by a confidential agreement (which I have had plenty of), I enjoy the free flow of knowledge. Sharing code, techniques in an application or just best use cases are the way to go in my opinion. You give, and then you receive.