This is a very good reason to write - I've learned about a ton of topics over the years at depths I wouldn't have bothered with if I weren't going to write blogposts about it. I really didn't need to spend a year chewing through other people's PhD work to understand some of the quirks of lead acid battery behavior I was seeing years back (Steve on IRC's description covered the details well enough to work around it), but if I was going to write it up[0], I wanted to actually understand it. And that took time.
But it misses one of the most important reasons I write: To force myself to finish projects and document things, so I can fully offload it from my brain.
I'm very prone to "90% done, eh, good enough, I'll finish it later..." sort of projects, and they take up a lot of mental space because I still have to (or, at least, try to...) remember state on the project. Before I write about something, I want it fully done, and then as part of writing it up, I trust myself to document anything weird, any odd findings, etc. Once I've done that, then I can entirely forget the details of the project, teardown, or whatever, knowing that if I need to do it again, I can go reference my old writeup and I'll know what I need to do!
Once written, I can just clear the brain-space out, and not worry about forgetting about it, because it's been written up, by me, in my style.
Also, copy editors and reviewers start to sound more like professional writing than "blogging," at least to me.
[0]: https://www.sevarg.net/2018/04/08/off-grid-rv-lead-acid-main...
There's so many articles in tech where the writer probably has less experience with something than literally anyone who will read their post, and it means there's effectively a content farm of what a new software engineer will learn in their first few months (if not years) on the job, written by software engineers in their first few months, with effectively no net information.
Someone with 20 years of experience with a technology will usually have a much harder time re-connecting with that beginner's mindset and doing a great job of providing the information that other newcomers most need to understand.
That's not to say that there isn't plenty of junk content out there, but I blame that more on inexperienced writers than on people who are writing about technology that they don't have a great deal of experience with.
A great writer should be able to write about something while they're learning while still producing content that's genuinely useful.
I like to utilise the socratic method while reading about something, I want to understand deeply.
I LOVE reading dev blogs about the journey of making something. I understand the frustrations when you know they are doing it "wrong". But, more often than not, for me at least, I always learn something new.
I once heard a senior developer say, 'I’m not shy to admit that after I finish a blog post, I’m at ease to forget about it—because I know I can always look it up again.
The most on point quote I know about this idea: "I don't write to say what I think, but to know what I think." (E. Berl)
Writing can help to become less confused, but being confused can incite to write a lot (J. Joubert: "The supremely false mind is the one that never senses when it goes astray.").
>the creation exists afterwards, and is thus available as a form of mnemonic for the creator. They can revisit and re-experience that sensation of creation that would otherwise have been transitory.
Other parts suggest that the literary writer writes to sharpen and go deeper into the experience of thinking, to extend it.
The two ideas seem related.
The alternative is a folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.
With the exception of egregious errors none of your readers will ever know how much better your piece of writing could have been.
There are a few themes [1], though I ended up writing my own [2] (which supports MathJax [3] for mathematical notation).
[1]: https://www.getzola.org/themes/
[0] https://www.itzami.com/blog/how-to-build-a-blog-with-nodejs
It renders to static HTML/CSS (unless you _want_ JS) and it feels lightweight. You can start with a plain unthemed site today and slowly add features/polish when you feel like procrastinating on writing :)
To get over this I just made simple personal blog/site using GH pages/jekyll/markup that doesn't have 1. A marketing version of a "publish" function and 2. the posts are perpetually in DRAFT.
Basically there is no 'done' which leaves me more comfortable in putting my thoughts on the internet instead of leaving them in my head. I can keep going back to the ideas and refining them.
I’m writing to help myself get better at technical communication and to solidify the concepts in my own head in depth.
However, something to remember is that, even when you're right, you'll still be wrong to many people on the internet.
My biggest barrier to getting back into blogging is the low return on investment. Absolutely nobody I know outside of developers on HN actually reads blogs today. Everyone seems to rely on YouTube/TikTok, ChatGPT, mainstream news articles, and maybe whatever blogspam The Google decides to surface. The days of "if you build it they will come" are long since dead, and even if I were to find regular readers, is it really worth my time to entertain or inform them when I could be out fishing on my boat?
I suspect a lot of junior devs set up blogs more as an experiment in setting up a linux server, static site generator, experimenting with Go/Rust/Ruby/PHP or whatever. Most lose interest when they realise the vast majority of people out there just aren't interested in their content and they get demotivated.
To me personally the word "blog" always sounds like something unpleasant somebody before you left in a toilet for you to discover. It's a shitty sounding word.
I've also had situations come up again and don't always immediately remember how I resolved it last time.
Just hit publish.
Most of the time you get absolutely no feedback. Heck, most of the time you get absolutely no views!
But sometimes you will get some feedback. And sometimes that feedback is nasty. So you put that in the bin.
Occassionally someone will contribute a really useful and interesting comment, maybe months after you wrote something (and completely forgot about), which can lead to all sorts of places. I've kept in regular contact with several commenters, and when they share their blogs I go there and comment, too. It's like the olden days of link wheels and what-not, instead of the forced "go comment for back links" the web has become in more recent years.
I blog loads - https://cyclingindoors.co.uk/ is another one, tracking my fitness. It's one of the best things I've ever done.
Seriously, just hit publish!
Hopefully I wont be one of these, but why do you use bad AI images as the most prominent piece in your posts ?
I've read one post and its not bad, but the images you use just really put me off. They give the felling of 'cheap'/'low effort', which is not an accurate representation of the text you wrote.
If that is an intentional stylistic choice, you should make it more clear to the reader. Maybe add a tagline to your blog? Adjust the theme? Or maybe add something in the text to make it clear why you made that choice.
In a sense using these kind of images is almost like a 'reverse clickbait', where you hide good content behind a really off-putting image and this prevents some from reaching the content you created. Personally, when I see bad AI images I just assume the text will be just a copy and paste from ChatGPT so I generally don't bother reading it.
This is not a rant against AI. I think you could have the same situation using bad stock images, for example.
No matter what subject (tech, travel blogging), writing forces you to organize and solidify your thoughts.
Bonus points when you do so in public, where you are open to scrutiny.
Most technical blog posts are boring. They look like documentation.
My best technical blog posts were the ones where I added personal stories about how I used the library/framework I was referring to.
The best advice from OP is to hire an editor. Especially for non-native English speakers (like me). A good editor can transform "good" technical content into exceptional content.
Michael Lynch, who regularly front-page HN has a great article about this: https://mtlynch.io/editor/
I'm strongly against AI for any writing since it smothers the author's voice into something that sounds generic and lifeless.
A really big point Larry tries to make during his lecture is that there are 2 types of writing. One you do for yourself (to help clear your ideas) and the other and the other one is designed to valuable to the reader.
And he is pretty obsessed with the idea of writing valuable text. He even says that if your text isn't valuable there is no point in making it persuasive, organized or clear.
For me this was a pretty interesting revelation. For most of my life I had this idea that the quality of the content and the quality of the writing were tightly related. And this idea made me believe that if you have good content, good writing should follow naturally.
After watching this lecture I realized that content and writing are separated axis, and you can definitely have one without the other. LLMs are pretty good at writing without content, for example.