[yan]

"definite must"? If I find a successful developer, for some value of successful, that doesn't blog, would that prove your friend wrong?

You need to decide what your goals are. Are you striving to optimize your career for followers/notoriety? Than yeah, having a blogging/twitter/social media presence is a must. If you're striving to optimize your life for maximum profits and earnings, than having an online presence can help, but is probably not a must. If you're striving to become a great developer/programmer and are doing it for the love of the craft, then spending time blogging/twittering/etc will probably get in your way.

[mbrubeck]

I agree, it's not a "must." But if you do it, I think you'll find it has deeper benefits than just fame and career advancement. My own blogging is about fun hacks that are educational for me but unrelated for my work. Blogging helps me learn better, because:

- Explaining things forces me to understand them better.

- Wanting to share what I've done motivates me to finish it.

- Comments from others teach me things I didn't know to look for myself.

[jim_lawless]

I agree 100% with the above. In addition, I find that a blog permits me to document some of my programming beliefs with example code. I can then cite these entries when in discussion with fellow programmers.

It's very easy to show someone an XSLT script that recursively generates primes as an example of why I believe XSL transforms are very close to Functional Programming.

[dmn]

Good way to put it in perspective, thanks.