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I study every day on my career, and consider it an academic exercise to read tech blogs on coding, design, server admin, etc... and I sometimes write about these topics to inform my clients. I kill 3 birds with one stone. I learn, I get to dive into topics deep that benefit my mind, and my work (doubly satisfying) and educate my clients. It lowers my stress when my research provides a very real world solution. (These are really good days) When I write about my understanding for my clients it is sort of like training and marketing at the same time. It forces me to know my subject better to make sure I am giving good advice to my clients. This is not documentation, I keep that separate. But I am finding more Digital Ocean articles the cross this boundry between mere documentation and useful teaching/tutorials. So it feels like a natural fit, I am interested in research and writing and others need what I know to do better at their work/business. But, I have other personal topics I research and write about (history, religion, health, etc...) that is not work related, but I keep them separate from work complete, keeps stress low. But I do use tech skills to help me with them. (ie, data scrapers and manipulation, graphs, analysis, apps, database access and APIs, etc...) But this relationship is one way, "work -> personal research", almost never "personal research -> work", unless it's purely a side effect of knowledge gained... These personal writings are more critical, some extensive (many years of research, writing and editing) and I have a family and decent social life. I just don't have real hobbies or too many time wasting activities, and I keep my personal research separate from my work research. I guess it's all priorities? |