Keeping a learning journal is extremely valuable for software developers, for many reasons:
Writing about what you’re doing helps clarify and internalize it. The post serves as documentation for the code, for teammates and your future self. When you inevitably have to do the same task again six months or two years later, you’ve written a cheat sheet for yourself. It looks great to prospective employers, demonstrating both writing and technical ability, among other things. We call these “TIL blogs” or “TILs” — short for “Today I Learned”. It isn’t meant to be a blog where you’re publishing brand new ideas that no one has ever thought of before — instead, they’re just notes to your future self. (But I do learn about a lot of new stuff by reading students’ TIL blogs, even after all these years.)
Here is a learning journal from a past student who went on to become an instructor himself, as a great example.
We’re going to use dev.to for our blogs, for now. (In the future you can consider building your own blog — that would be a good Rails exercise.)
Sign up for a dev.to accountLinks to an external site. — I recommend signing in with GitHub so that you don’t have to make up yet another password. Submit the URL of your learning journal. It will look something like “https://dev.to/demostudent18”
Start jotting down notes in your Workspace/notes/ folder. When you feel inspired, share something you’ve learned as a TIL post.
A great source of TIL blog posts are Piazza discussions (your own or others). To really cement what you learned, re-write the Piazza discussion as a TIL post.