You Should Write More
How often does this happen to you: Your program crashes with a mysterious exception. You paste the crash logs into Google. The first link has a solution. Hooray!
You found this magical solution because some good samaritan in the past decided to share his or her notes.
You, too, can be a good samaritan! If you've ever come across a problem that had no solution easily found online, I invite you to share your work. You don't have to write a novel; it could even just be a sentence or two, as long as it's enough to help others out.
Here's a non-exhaustive list of ways to contribute:
- Blog post
- Forum post
- Workaround in a bug report
- Github gist
- StackOverflow answer
As long as your work is public and indexed by search engines you're golden. Then someone can, in the future, be saved time and effort1.
In addition, if you find a solution to a problem online, thank the author! Leave a comment, upvote their answer, whatever. Appreciation feels good.
1 Fun story: I once Googled a problem and found a solution to it on StackOverflow... that I'd written three years previous. You might just end up helping yourself!