I taken to writing up tutorials for tasks that take me a non-trivial amount of effort to accomplish and are obscure enough to not have decent existing writeups

I taken to writing up tutorials for tasks that take me a non-trivial amount of effort to accomplish and are obscure enough to not have decent existing writeups on the first page of Google searches. Little things about [automating file upload in Ruby](https://davidyat.es/2015/02/26/automated-file-upload-in-ruby-with-nethttp-and-multipart/ https://davidyat.es/2015/02/26/automated-file-upload-in-ruby...) and [setting up a UniFi controller with SELinux](https://davidyat.es/2015/03/02/unifi-centos-selinux/ https://davidyat.es/2015/03/02/unifi-centos-selinux/). I had doubts about whether I was actually providing worthwhile content that hadn't been provided elsewhere before (especially in the latter post, where I paraphrased another person's post for half the article (with credit) just to get to my part), but they've ended up some of the most popular posts on my blog. Even when I discover [I can't do something](https://davidyat.es/2015/05/13/notes-on-csrf-and-json-apis/ https://davidyat.es/2015/05/13/notes-on-csrf-and-json-apis/), it's good to blog about it, just to straighten out my thoughts, contextualise my work and aid the research of future people going down the same tracks. And even if it's just something tiny and silly like [this awful injection-focused SQL query](https://davidyat.es/select-only-nth-row-in-t-sql/ https://davidyat.es/select-only-nth-row-in-t-sql/), it's nice to have it written down for easy public access -- for your own benefit as much as anyone else's. And even if very few people ever read them, I find writing posts about little things helps improve my understanding -- it's just a good way to organise my thoughts and make sure I remember the stuff later on. And the benefit of publicly accessible blogposts over a personal notebook is that I can reach them from almost any situation I might need to, and refer friends and co-workers struggling with the same issues to them. It's a great feeling having someone ask "how do I do XYZ?" and being able to say "I wrote a blog about it!". Plus it saves you the trouble of remembering long terminal commands and exact syntax offhand.