I finally sat down and wrote an article comparing MonoRail to ASP.NET (if you're interested, it's here). There are two interesting things I've learned in the process of writing it.

First, going into writing the article I had a good idea about the differences and how they compare, but by the time I finished I gained much clearer picture. Having to go through analysing each project step by step, thinking about what each feature means, thinking about pros and cons of each project, helped me to understand them better. I'm sure when I go back to add to and revise the article I will learn even more. In the future, whenever I don't understand something I'm going to sit down and try to write my thoughts down. Maybe because writing has a speed limit (or at least it's really slow in comparison to the speed of thought) I have more time to analyze the subject. I'm not sure what exact reason is, but this experience proved to me that one good approache to understand something is to write about it.

Another realization came from the fact that I've known about writing technique mentioned above before. I could see that it can be useful logically, but when I tried to understand something I never thought of writing my thoughts down. Well, the lesson I have learned is that it's important to try different things. It's important to listen to what other people have to say, but it's even more important to go ahead and experiment. Everybody is different, with different biases and different opinions, so most likely you won't know for sure what works the best for you until you get your hands on it. So my advice is read and listen to other people, but try as many things as possible (in software development and in life). It's good for you. Try it!:)

P.S. With this post the blog is starting to go away from the development topic, but I think things I tried to talk about here are important in computer programming world as well as anywhere else.