I think author missed #8: I've personally benefited so much from the writings shared by others that it feels amiss to not share back things I've learned and little tips and tricks. One of my most viewed blog posts is a really short and simple one on simulating drag-and-drop of files with Playwright automation. I found no such information when I ran into this problem so the only logical thing to do was to share it for the next person that ran into this issue.
I always encourage devs I mentor to write more and to share what they learn. For all of the reasons that the author listed, but also because it's a mechanism to give back to the community that all of us rely on whether we're writing code, making a recipe, doing a craft, learning a new hobby, etc.
A lot of younger devs tell me "why would anyone want to read my writing" and I show them YouTube and how many different videos there are on how to make a pancake (and more are added every day!). There's a different audience for every voice and someone out there is looking for your voice. Everyone should make a habit to write in long form.
I think people get hung up on the tech stack of a blog, so while I appreciate the timeline, I think we put too much emphasis on that in general..
Personally; have one sole purpose for my blog: to turn the arguments you conclude in the shower into something productive.
It's somewhat cathartic to write down in as many words as you want to, with as much time as you want to: the actual underpinning arguments of a stance you hold, with citations and alternative opinions considered.
Writing a comment on HN is nice, but largely there's a time pressure, wait a day for a good response and the conversation has concluded... or, make it too long and you lose your audience.
A blog post allows you time to reflect, not be reactive, and to truly get your point across, and people are more likely to read it.
This is the key to do anything over a long period of time but certainly applies to blogging. Nothing is better than intrinsic motivation and something you do for yourself. I have a blog that I try to keep up with. I fail to be consistent and one reason always has been me asking "Who should I write it for" instead of "What do I want to write about for myself". Something to take away here.
A couple of observations from the text that resonate with me:
* "Blogging helps me become a better writer, which in turns helps me become a better developer." Yes. Writing is super-important as a developer, particularly in a corporate setting, because communicating ideas clearly is critical in convincing others and in showing your contributions. And to be a better writer, well, one has to write more and blogging helps with that!
* "The posts have grown larger and more ambitious." I've noticed a similar change in my own blog, where posts have grown from frequent 300-word long posts to infrequent 3000-word long posts. Other platforms like Twitter have captured the space of short form writing and, more "importantly", consuming such content.
In any case, my own recap at the 20-year mark from 3 months ago is here: https://jmmv.dev/2024/06/20-years-of-blogging.html ;-)
Now, I write for myself, mostly to remember things that I can re-read later. And to have a URL on the web that I can give out with answers to topics that I have to answer repeatedly. I write plain text without any front-matter, or tags, as simple as it gets that GitHub Pages can spit out. If the basic CloudFlare analytics is to be believed, it continuous to be pretty well visited.
But I like tinkering with it, and there are many unfinished articles. I think I will keep it for as long as I can. https://brajeshwar.com
If I ever finally find the motivation to start a blog, I think this is a key point. Vanity metrics would be demotivating.
I have taken great care to preserve all of the posts on my personal website, but unfortunately I don’t write new posts very often lately. I wonder if that’ll change.
Eventually I was struggling in the job market and someone suggested that my writing was hurting my prospects. They found the odd typo and grammar mistake, thought the content wasn't particularly good, that it was hard to follow/disjointed, etc.
I immediately took it all down and felt like a bit of a fool to have thought anyone would actually find it useful. Maybe I should have written it but kept it offline like a personal journal, I thought.
After a year or so it occurred to me how incredibly wrong all of that was. I never should have taken anything offline. I've hired people before, many times, and not once did I stumble across a candidate's personal blog and think "ugh, typos. grammar mistakes. no thanks". These things are a signal of a person's character, curiosity, ability, and all kinds of other factors that matter a lot. Almost always these things helped people I was hiring more than it hurt. There's the odd case where I could tell the site wasn't followed through on and that's not great, but it's very relatable too.
I took a while but started writing again, started sharing it in an attempt to shake the self-doubt out of myself, and it has been an incredibly refreshing and rejuvenating experience. Writing reminds me of what I love about programming, because I primarily write about the things I find fascinating or engaging. It gives me a greater sense of knowledge and ability as I've covered a topic so thoroughly. It's a mental exercise not only in writing itself, but understanding.
Jonas says this and I couldn't agree more: something about it is just fun. I can't put my finger on it. When I'm writing, I'm in a focused and engaged state almost instantly. It's where I want to be.
If you doubt yourself and feel like writing isn't for you—even though you enjoy it—I hope you can take something from my experience and realize that it's still worth it. No one cares if you don't write like an acclaimed author. No one cares if there's the odd typo or bad grammar. The point is to enjoy it, and share that with people who are curious. The more you do it, the better you'll get. It can become a real source of joy in your life.
I also run a blog and have since 1997. Didn't start seriously contributing until 2008 or so. It's a labor of love and I do it for many of the reasons stated here. Love to write, love to push myself to make things more "usable" for folks other than me. And it helps me check myself on certain topics (do I understand this enough to teach it to someone else?)
I have been hassled by some younger folks who say "blogging is dead" (can't argue with that) and it's a waste of time because it will never make me viral, rich, or famous (I knew that before I started). But I do it for me, and I still recommend other people do it as well. It's good for the soul.
I've written on various blogs, including my own, since the late 90s, but I have been blogging consistently on a single instance for a little over 17 years. I've seen my writing shift from long form to rapid fire and back again.
I've also noticed that it's become mostly formulaic, as a way of dispersing information to folks. But it's those rare occasions where I'm actually struck with the inspiration to write a longer form thought piece that really brings me back to the whole reason I started my current blog.
Again, super happy to read this piece and the comments here. I'll remain hopeful that it inspires others to start — or to return to — blogging. It's really an incredible means of communicating with one another.
I find HN far and away the most random aggregator. Reddit is very reliable for me. When I share my posts on HN they almost never get traction. But then they randomly do months later when someone shares the same post! Kind of annoying.
My blog is artisanal handcrafted HTML and CSS. I honestly find it much easier and simpler than generators.
I currently host on Cloudflare for free. I was previously on Netlify.
Things I love about your blog:
- The fact that every post has links to the sourcecode!
- Open source
- No ads, no trackers, no popups
- I can tell you use this all the time. So I know you strive to make your content as good as possible _for you_. Which is a strong signal that it will also be good _for me_.
- I love the timeline (but wish they were done in a way that reflects scale, see user test video for more)
Here's my user test: https://news.pub/?try=https://www.youtube.com/embed/UF7fjvE_...
> I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read
is the exact opposite mindset sentence (or whatever people want to call it) of what I wrote in my Medium account bio, which is "I write for myself so that everyone can read it."
Here is the link -> https://medium.com/@shahzaib
My blog, in its current iteration, has also recently turned 15 (first post on June 27th, 2009). Reflecting on this long journey and how it has helped my career, I've decided to write a book about the experience.
If you'll excuse a bit of self-promotion, those interested can find out more at https://codertocto.com.
I hope sharing my journey might be helpful to others on a similar path.
What is that? I have a few theories.
One is that the developer doesn't really want to ultimately write a game.
Creating the assets needed for a game, as an example, can be daunting. Implementing high scores, audio, saving game state.... There is a lot of work to create a game beyond the rendering part.
Or the developer is intimidated by the more qualitative nature of the "game part" of the game. The engine can be measured in FPS, etc. How do you measure how fun the game is?
A recent approach I took was to write the game "firstmost" — the game engine was a necessity to realizing that goal. FWIW, I used SDL to create a kind of sprite engine. The "engine" was bare-bones but allowed me to recreate a shareware game of mine for Steam.
After the project was done I began a second (sprite-based) game by first moving over the same game engine code. But this new project required I extend the engine (there were new "feature requirements" unique to this new game).
In this way the engine can evolve from project to project, but never becomes a means to no end.
(And if you do it right, you ought to be able to pull the engine back into the original project with a minimal of refactoring.)
Maybe I'm just suggesting something that everyone already knows.
What's more, all search engines are disallowed, and there are no comments, so it's just for me and a few people who know about it. Design-wise, it's just a single file with minimal HTML, and thousands of entries, sorted by time. You can search it with cmd-f, or have the page scroll to a random entry. It loads in about a second. There are at least two ways it gives me value: in having an archive of 25+ years of things I thought were important, and giving me a reason to keep my eyes open for things to think and post about.
I think that's an unusual reason to have a blog, but I also think the people who started blogs to make money or get hired are probably out of the game by now, too.
Its not really a new problem, scraping the web and similar for monetary profit has been a thing for decades, but it feels worse in some ways? At least I certainly have paused and had more of a reluctance to making minor things available with no strings attached than I historically have been.
Same goes for writing into sites like HN or Reddit really.
Perhaps that is being selfish, after all there is some value in documenting things for other humans to find out about, maybe time-capsule of a blog is a better fit for this? Although blogging about anything particularly niche / context heavy is likely irrelevant a few years on.
EDIT:
[1] As in not help them even in a minuscule way, anymore than has already been done with them buying / scraping any public content already written.
That's me. I started in 2006, except I just post photos.
I personally hope the internet and it's archives stick around for a long time. I wonder whether the future will be interested in the past. Who among us might live in obscurity today, only to be a star in 2424?
One of my main thoughts was documenting things I have found I had to do to with certain projects to get it the way I want, like homebrew packages I need to install and what to setup for if and when I wipe my computer and start fresh or get a new computer and want to set it up like I am used to.
I have had many times I forget little things I had to do and end up going through the whole spiel of getting it to work correctly.
Maybe blog posts should be a little lower effort, like tweets.
My original blog would be old enough to commit cr-- drive now.
don't do that to me
I know it's a cliché but it's very true
Coincidentally the platform hits nearly all of the wished items in this recent lobste.rs post https://lobste.rs/s/d1n9k6/kind_websites_i_like
You can drag and drop your entire blog from a markdown file https://indieweb.social/@xenodium/112265481282475542 User your favorite text editor to write.
No need to sign up or log in to try it out. You can edit ephemeral blogs.
I haven't officially launched, but if you'd like to get blogging, I'll be happy to share an invite code to get you started now. Ping help AT lmno.lol.
This is now to me the "old school" internet creator attitude (that I still possess). I don't blog as much any more but do create content elsewhere - a lot of it is for my own enjoyment and creative outlet, to blow off steam, whatever - the fact that other people may want to watch it is secondary. I do try to do things people want, but only if I want to do it.
The only reason I highlight this is that the up and coming generations absolutely do not see content creation in the same way. I got in an absurd argument with an early 20 something on a social media platform about how annoying ads were that were disguised as content. The response was overwhelmingly "Well, how else do you expect content creators to make a living?"
I do not disagree that creators should be able to monetize their content however they please, but the fact that people see that as the end and only goal of content creation is baffling to me and almost certainly making it worse. This same person tried to tell me it's been the same way since the earliest days of youtube - which they would have been in diapers around that time - is absolutely not true. The idea of content creation as a full time career is relatively new, and I hate it. The worst part is if you don't participate in the type of obnoxious engagement hacking or buried ads that these "professional" creators do, the algorithms punish you for it.