Get Writing!

One of the things our students have found most helpful to solidify their understanding of this material is to write it down. There is no better test of your understanding of a topic than attempting to teach it to somebody else. This is helpful even if you never show your writing to anybody—but it’s even better if you share it! So we recommend that, if you haven’t already, you start a blog. Now that you’ve completed Chapter 2 and have learned how to train and deploy models, you’re well placed to write your first blog post about your deep learning journey. What’s surprised you? What opportunities do you see for deep learning in your field? What obstacles do you see?

Rachel Thomas, cofounder of fast.ai, wrote in the article “Why You (Yes, You) Should Blog”:

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The top advice I would give my younger self would be to start blogging sooner. Here are some reasons to blog:
* It’s like a resume, only better. I know of a few people who have had blog posts lead to job offers!
* Helps you learn. Organizing knowledge always helps me synthesize my own ideas. One of the tests of whether you understand something is whether you can explain it to someone else. A blog post is a great way to do that.
* I’ve gotten invitations to conferences and invitations to speak from my blog posts. I was invited to the TensorFlow Dev Summit (which was awesome!) for writing a blog post about how I don’t like TensorFlow.
* Meet new people. I’ve met several people who have responded to blog posts I wrote.
* Saves time. Any time you answer a question multiple times through email, you should turn it into a blog post, which makes it easier for you to share the next time someone asks.
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Perhaps her most important tip is this:

: You are best positioned to help people one step behind you. The material is still fresh in your mind. Many experts have forgotten what it was like to be a beginner (or an intermediate) and have forgotten why the topic is hard to understand when you first hear it. The context of your particular background, your particular style, and your knowledge level will give a different twist to what you’re writing about.

We’ve provided full details on how to set up a blog in <>. If you don’t have a blog already, take a look at that now, because we’ve got a really great approach set up for you to start blogging for free, with no ads—and you can even use Jupyter Notebook!