Learn new technology through writing a tutorial about it

I like to get my feet wet on new technologies, but find if I don’t use it for some time, e.g., several months, I will forget a lot of details, not sure whether other people have the same feeling :-). To let me get a quick refreshment of the technology after a while, I resort to the old school method: writing notes. But one day, I came out a idea: why not try to write a tutorial during studying instead of only recording? So in the past 2 years, Golang 101 hacks and  OpenMP Little Book are born. The whole process is really rewarding :

(1) Sometimes you think you have grasped the knowledge, but when you begin to write an article to explain it, you will find there are some points you can’t understand thoroughly. To make your article more clearly, you need to write code to verify it, look for help in the internet, etc. Among this process, you will get a deeper understanding.

(2) Your tutorial can be reviewed by other brilliant engineers who can point out your mistakes, in the meantime, the tutorial can also help others. E.g., I find my tutorial is quoted in stackoverflow’s answer occasionally, and it really encourages me!

(3) Since I am not a native English speaker, creating an English tutorial can also help to improve and practice my English skills. I highly recommend you use English to compose, because that can make your idea shared among the people all over the world!

Based on above points, writing technological tutorial is definitely a win-win process. Why not give a shot? I think you can!