I used to blog a lot. I used to be active on lots of forums and they were the source of inspiration. Someone would ask a question, I'd write it out as a blog post and then keep linking to it instead of answering repeatedly. I remember writing blog posts like tweets.
Now, there are too many contents online (both good and bad), and I always felt "someone must have written about it somewhere."
A few years back, I began to write again but this time, I write for myself, family, and friends. I no longer care about who reads or visits my blog(s). I have no analytics, no comments, no nothing.
Not as frequent as 15+ years ago but now I write our family stories, collect and document things I'm inspired by, aspire to be, etc on our blog(s). I'm even writing my memoir so I can read it later in life. This is a fun one, trying to remember early/younger years friends. Write about the adventures with the friends who have died, organizing search effort for friends whom I have lost touch and then finding them in places where Internet is still a luxury. If you just sit still for a while, you began to realize your life is an adventure.
I also write a lot on physical pen/paper too. I have one special paper notebook dedicated to my daughters. It is not hidden but is usually around my desk, and I write as and when I feel like or prompted by incidents. I want it to be written in my handwriting for them to read, now and in the future.
I similarly have a “tech blog” that only a couple of non-tech friends know about (admittedly it wouldn’t be hard to find if someone searched for it, but who would want to do that). It’s good writing and thinking practice, especially because when my friends read it they make fun of it in ways that help me clear up my writing, even if they don’t fully understand the content.
This is nice to hear. I've favorited your comment on HN. I do something similar where I try to write what happened to me every day, it makes it interesting to look back over the years.
It's hard to judge what other people would find interesting about what you have to say. Things you think are obvious are obvious and boring may be illuminating to others, and vice versa.
Anyway, I don't think the author has really given blogging a fair shake.
> On his blog, Aaron Swartz explains how writing things down will help him reflect better on his thoughts.
The author doesn't really investigate this line of thought. The thing about writing a blog post is that good writing requires clear thinking, and clear thinking is useful!
It would be nice if we could tap into that benefit in personal journals without publishing a blog, but as far as I can tell, most people write differently when they write only for themselves. There's a number of benefits of writing for an audience, even if that audience turns out not to exist. When I blog, I feel forced to justify my reasoning and investigate alternatives. I feel the need to explain something a little deeper than whatever literal series of events that I'm talking about.
I think programmers who don't like writing and don't like sharing should at least give blogging a shot... there's a chance that it will help you think better, and there are also plenty of opportunities that will open for you if you are a stronger writer.
> good writing requires clear thinking, and clear thinking is useful!
Exactly this. The act of writing it down (whatever "it" is - code, prose, marketing materials, technical documents, mind maps, whatever) is inseparable from the process by which it was invented. If you value the end product, you have to value the process as a forcing function for clear thinking.
But that doesn't mean you have to publish a blog! There are other ways to transfer knowledge. Personally, most of my writing efforts have gone from blogging to markdown files in github repos.
The author is also complaining that blog posts are n-copies of something original. This whole programming and cs business is all like that. How many of us read academic papers that first described this algorithm or that technique? Most of us never do. We are consuming copies of copies of copies and it just works!! A blog post by a beginner on something might more approachable to other beginner who might find the expert's explanation intimidating, maybe because the expert that just assumed his audience knows so much.
my evisceral impression from this - blog post - is the author really needs a good boost for their morale and self valuation and confidence and the results may or may not include a amount of blogging, but will answer the call for a response which I am certain is written through every single pixel of this unnecessarily self deprecating rhetoric. the author clearly should, sometime, explore their writing skills and technology insights, but I don't think that is what has prompted this or what actually matters.
> They are your typical run-of-the-mill tutorials that replicate what's written on the official framework/language guide
Yep, I'd like to permanently blacklist those idiotic baeldung, w3schools, tutorialspoint, and geeksforgeeks blogspam entries that SEO'ed themselves to the top of every google search I do for anything programming related.
I've found baeldung to be quite helpful actually. What do you not like about it? I understand what you mean though, I don't like the garbage programming-related articles from a lot of these sites you've listed. Even I as a newb developer have seen very poor advice or wrong info on w3schools, for example.
w3schools has come a long way since the days of w3fools. What incorrect info. do you see on w3schools currently ? I find it to be a decent source these days.
> I've found baeldung to be quite helpful actually. What do you not like about it?
It's probably great when you're looking to fill some gaps but not when you're starting fresh and trying to wrap your head around some things. Many a times I've found the examples incomplete in the sense that yes, they work (usually) but just show me how, not why. Or maybe it's just the nature of the beast that Spring is. I've given up on Baeldung, I skip it when googling Java related stuff. But that's just my experience.
There's an extension for Chrome and Firefox called "uBlacklist" that lets you do exactly this - you can maintain a list of domains that you never want to appear in the results of Google searches that you do.
You don’t need an extension. You can just use the `-site` operator, and put your list in a bookmarklet, or use your browser’s ability to define search shortcuts, if it has that.
Baeldung I've found to be fantastic for Java tricks and Java library usage. Geeksforgeeks blogspam really helped me with algorithm problems while preparing for Leetcode-style interviews.
I'd agree though that w3schools and tutorialspoint do as much harm as good.
Try the userscript "Google Hit Hider by Domain (Search Filter / Block Sites)" by Jefferson Scher, whom you may know as one of the top support specialist at Mozilla: http://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/
"GHHbD" is a precursor to uBlacklist; and was THE replacement to blocking sites on Google Search after Google removed the built-in function, many years ago.
But sometimes official documentation can be cryptic like man pages and some Python documentation. Those g4gs and others usually have easy to understand examples and some extra explanation you don't in get official documentation.
Whats funny is they have SEO'd their way to the top and once you are accustomed to it and scroll past them you are also scrolling past the top (or maybe all) the ads on the right hand side of search results.
I myself would really like to have a blog again, like I used to have. Sometimes write a post or write about some software I am trying to write. However, I do not have a blog. Not, because I could not easily make one. I could indeed easily create one. I wrote multiple blog software thingies myself in the past. I do not have a blog, because of laws, where I live. There is a law, that you must put your contact information on the site, if you do any of a few things. Even though I am not doing any of those things, there are lawyers out there just waiting to send you a letter, when you do not have contact information on your page. You be careful, that nothing you write could be interpreted as "journalistic" or "ads", otherwise that lawyer might win the case. Actually you do not want a case in the first place.
I would like to write about anything I want online on a blog, for everyone to read or ignore. I would like to make fun of politicians and write about how they are doing things wrong. Or about philosophy and ethics. Well, if I did that and did not provide contact info, I would be making myself a target for greedy people, who do not care about free speech.
So I stay without a blog and simply manage my git repositories. It is really sad, that the law is this silly and basically antagonistic towards blogging and not wanting every perv on the net to know, where I live or how to give me a call. I know very few blogs from my country and I think the blogging scene is basically dead here.
How about a pseudonym? Or how about I make a repository with a blog for you and give you owner access to it? It's my site, you're just invited to contribute. I don't think I need an impressum then.
> I would like to make fun of politicians and write about how they are doing things wrong.
> [..]
> It is really sad, that the law is this silly and basically antagonistic towards blogging and not wanting every perv on the net to know, where I live or how to give me a call.
Not saying you would write anything bad but what's fun to one can be libel or hate speech to another. "It was just a joke, dude" shouldn't fly. That's one of the reasons some of these laws are in place. Of course it runs the gamut between an healthy democracy with free speech and an authoritarian and controlling state.
With that being said I am curious about lawyers out there just waiting. Do they have anything to win or any legs to stand on if what you wrote doesn't concern them and no clients is asking them to write a letter to you ? What's the situation like in practice ?
Not sure I want to find out in practice. You can be ruled to have to pay up to what was it? 25k or 50k€. In the past there have been "Abmahnwellen" (literal translation "sue waves"), where lawyers tons of letters to any website superficially not conforming to the law. I wish they were doing that now with GDPR in place, but it does not seem to happen for some reason. Perhaps because organizations can fight back more easily or are less easily cowed into paying fines and thus would be too much work for them. Writing about anything political could be interpreted as "journalistic" and I would actually be breaking the law, not having contact info of specific form on my site. The law is even formulated in a way, that you must put contact info, even if you host your site in other countries or regions, because you "operate" here. In the post cases have shown, that you also cannot use a mail box / post box as contact info either.
I guess you could make a blog on some random blogging site, not self hosted, so that one could not get your name by asking the hoster of your server and by using a fake name and always connecting to it using a reliable VPN service. But yeah, that would be against the law ...
It was a good read, you clearly have interesting things to say!
I do share a lot of the same things you describe. I would like to blog, mainly for myself to practice writing and keep a record of things, but yeah, it’s difficult. I also find it’s a lot of work to do the research and all, time I maybe rather spend on building things.
It is, but AFAICT the entire blog is just this post.
> I also find it’s a lot of work to do the research and all, time I maybe rather spend on building things
I found it useful to set a timer and write about small things, e.g. through this post [1] about blocking websites with /etc/hosts. It took about 20 minutes and I can share it with my interested friends. If I were a little faster, I could probably do it in 10.
> It is, but AFAICT the entire blog is just this post.
A solid start! I'm looking forward to the next one.
> I found it useful to set a timer and write about small things
I should try that. I do enjoy the deep dive into a topic, but then I will never finish/publish something. Also quite perfectionistic which doesn't help, but your strategy sounds interesting, will give that a go.
I like your short story format btw, it's nice, and interesting topics as well. Also looks like you are on a good streak, keep it going!
Thank you! And I hear you on the perfectionism -- another reason I held off for so long, and something I'll write about in the future. Unweaving it has been so freeing, and at the same time I'm doing better work than ever before.
It is not the case that "things" are interesting in and of themselves.
An audience finds them interesting or not. Interest is a property of the listener or observer.
You can just comment on the things you find interesting, and presumably there are some people out there more or less like you that will find the same things interesting.
It is worth noting that it takes some skill and effort to make things interesting for an audience, and that can be substantial.
I use my blog to keep a journal on technical issues that were hard to fix, or was hard to find web sources about the subject. One of my top post is about using PFSense router with Verizon FIOS. It usually receives 2-3 unique visitors a day. It is simple and not interesting, but it helps a few people, so I keep it online.
I was once looking for a solution to some technical problem, clicked on a promising web result, and found myself at my blog. I had posted a solution several years earlier but had forgotten about it.
> I was once looking for a solution to some technical problem, clicked on a promising web result, and found myself at my blog. I had posted a solution several years earlier but had forgotten about it.
That is funny.
Once I recognized that I have been researching the same topics I have researched before, it motivated me to change my blog from a "Hack the Box" showcase blog, to adding my technical journal on topics that were hard to find online and sharing my experience with certifications.
I have been thinking of adding more personal entries, but I don't want to make the blog a social media.
Once I have a weird curl bug that the software was using and I went to GitHub to report the issue. Turn out I did report the issues 4 years ago and there is no one to look into this. For some reason the software was having curl errors due to Windows' version of curl. The only way I can fix this is to
'remove-item alias:curl" since the alias is set to Invoke-WebRequest in PowerShell when software want to use curl command. Yes there is curl.exe but the software didn't know that.
I occasionally (yesterday in fact) experience this on StackOverflow. I'll be looking for an answer and come across one of my own answers or comments that I have no recollection of writing.
>"You've got to be willing to read other people's code, and then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong." -Bill Gates
>"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a
violent psychopath who knows where you live. Code for readability." -John Woods
To summarize: Some day you might discover that you need to maintain your own code you wrote a long time ago, and you've turned into a violent psychopath who can remember your own address.
Circular reference? Joking aside, you write for yourself first when you write a blog. You learn better when writing about something and you see the gaps in your understanding when you try to explain something to others.
A few years ago, I decided to stop blogging and instead focus that energy towards sharing my work and thoughts in other (typically more academic) venues. So, now, I focus more on posters, talks, papers, and the like in my professional spaces. It's a bit more involved than just throwing up a blog post, but it also helps me narrow in my interests so the work I do submit is more complete and interesting. It also has a wider audience than my blog ever had. And so, instead, my personal website looks more like an academic CV with links to my work presented at conferences and in journals, but with a decidedly industry spin and sometimes with some additional context/summary.
YMMV, but just a thought for those that are also weighing decisions around blogging versus not.
That's interesting. I have heard a lot about posters from academics over the years. Is there some huge virtual corkboard for academics somewhere or where do these posters go and what are they for? (If you get a second for HN comments :-))
They're typically just easy ways to submit early work, work in progress, etc to a conference with relatively little commitment.
I'm in the biomedical informatics world generally, and for my conferences it's a one-page abstract that describes your work, if accepted after peer review (which, there's a 90% acceptance rate) you then make a poster with more details about what you did and then stand by it for about an hour during the conference and answer any questions from people walking by. Then I typically just have links to the abstract and PDF of the poster on my website.
The poster doesn't prevent you from doing anything further... so, if you keep working on it, you can turn it into a talk or paper. And a lot of companies will pay for your travel to a conference if you're presenting, so it's often the lowest-effort way to get your company to pay for you to go to a conference.
Just yesterday I was walking in the park with a friend, a singer, who was saying that these days she has nothing to sing, no-one to sing for...I said, gee that sounds like a song, and we started writing it. "I've got nothing to sing, no-one to sing for" etc. It went on about how her friends betrayed her and her man hasn't yet appeared. Then today I read this! The blog version.
I kind of agree with the author. There's also a lot of garbage content online and the problem with:
> I don't have anything interesting to say
is that people who truly don't have anything interesting to say often don't have the self-awareness to think like that.
I used to have a blog. Actually, multiple blogs back in the mid aughts and I've learned the following:
- from a game theory perspective, unless you're really good and have truly interesting things to say, you'll be better off not saying anything as you only have things to lose. You're only increasing your 'attack surface' for stalkers, future job prospects, etc.. It's very hard to keep things to yourself especially when you start having a following and then you start to overshare, push out some ideas some might find controversial or even ideas which become controversial as time goes by. You're better off just not saying shit.
- if you have a dry technical blog which may help some poor souls only searching for a technical solution then go for it. But don't try to make a career out of it.
- if you work for a BigCo, you need to self-censor big time. Anything you say can be associated with your workplace (regardless of your disclaimer) and get you in hot water.
- even if you are anonymous, that's not a guarantee you won't get doxxed (see Slate Star Codex as an example).
- if you think it will help your job prospects, even if you have a dry emotionless uncontroversial blog, think again. Nobody actually gives a shit about your blog except if you're on a very VERY narrow technology niche with few professionals. I don't know about others, but in most of my employment efforts, hiring gauntlet maintainers barely care about your actual experience and your blog is not even a data point.
I have a blog, to write things as a note for myself. It has helped me keep pushing and satisfying my curiosity. I write random things. I don't even have trackers or cookies enabled because I do not care if blog gets any view!
So if you are afraid that people will find it boring, then write for yourself. Writing for oneself means you want to be able to write in a way such that you will go back to your note to remind you of things you learned.
As you as said, pointing to the original is enough. If that is it, then just log those links and when you have time, go through them again! Once you will understand it is quite time consuming to review it, you may start writing!
Good thing about writing in public is that you will want to set a bar for yourself. Something like commitment! Setting this bar will slowly improve your thought process and it brings other positive effects!
It maintains a level of commitment. I don't normally write for myself, because I will always keep going back to the original source. But when I need something, that I feel like I need for a long time, I write it as if someone else is going to read it. This helps me escape all the lazy points that I have!
The main reason I blog is to improve my writing. Because I've been blogging for about 10 years, I have a record of how it's changed over time. I'd like to think that it's gotten better, but I have no feedback on that.
Most of what I blog about is whatever game I've finished playing. I usually end up collaborating what others have said, but I'll add in a few notes or grievances that stand out to me that I haven't found anyone else talking about. When I read an old post, I'll come across those little things and I remember exactly what I was thinking about and why I wrote that.
> I'm not a good programmer
Me neither. I'm not some demigod like John Carmack. I'm an everyday programmer working the web mines. When I'm not blogging about games, I sometimes blog about some nifty feature I implemented[1] or novel way of solving a problem that I wanted to take note of.
> I don't think it's good CV building
I'm 99% certain that no one has read my blog and wanted to hire me because of it.
I guess that's a long-winded way of saying that I write and blog for myself. I use it more like a personal journal instead of groundbreaking thoughts that I want everyone to read.
I have a blog. Almost nobody reads it. That's okay!
I treat it like a public notebook. When I find something interesting, I write a quick blog post. When I have to muddle through a technical issue that requires piecing together multiple other sources on the Internet, I write a blog post to summarize. I've written blog posts on getting Walmart security videos to play (Verint codec is a bitch), decoding Marine Corps brig phone call audio time stamps, setting up CAC readers and DoD Root Certificates on a Mac, actually moving Time Machine history to a new Mac (which should happen automatically but never seems to work for me), etc.
My blog isn't the only source of this information on the web. It usually isn't the first source. It's rarely the best source (for a while, it was the best source for figuring out Walmart Verint security videos, but my solution is now outdated). But I do my best to put things together in a way that will be helpful to someone in the future who doesn't know what he's doing -- even and especially if that future ignoramus is me.
Thanks for sharing. I know the answer for the following question may differ for the individual, but how long (or how many posts) did it take to find your “stride” so to speak?
I wouldn't say I have a "stride" now. I don't write unless I personally feel the topic is interesting so it's tough to call my writing scheduled or disciplined.
Most of my posts go almost completely unread -- that's fine by me.
" I feel like I should have a blog. Specifically, a tech blog. Everything points towards it! I like coding, I like reading, I particularly like reading blog posts. So then, why don't I have one?! "
Well, do you like writing? Does the main thing that should point toward it point toward it? At the end this person says
"I think the gist of it is... blogging is clearly made for people who enjoy writing and/or sharing. And I think it's okay if I'm not particularly fond of any of those two things. I shouldn't succumb to the peer pressure of thinking that everybody but me has a blog. So, if I were to have a blog, the motivation should be noble and straightforward: "I like to write and share my experiences". "
Well there you go, perfectly reasonable conclusion. Not sure if all the middle stuff was necessary, to be honest.
Following the answers to this thread, it seems you have to justify yourself for not having a blog.
If you plainly answer "I don't want to", it's not acceptable. It is mandatory, like having a public GitHub, and so on.
I'm happy for people that like writing — in fact I love reading. I'm happy for those that participate in Open Source.
I still do prefer to participate in family activities, playing video games, working in my metal workshop...
I have had an on-off relationship with writing for most of my life.
The unintuitive truth about writing is that the writing happens before the sentences happen. Another way people make this point is by saying “writing is really just revising”.
I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that writing is the second step in a linear process, the first of which is “finding out what to say, or coming up with an idea or opinion”. No. Simply write. If you can’t think of anything, write “I have writer’s block” then write the next random sentence that comes to your head. If necessary, just write down an amusing string of random words. Follow it up with another. If possible use a pen and paper, and most of all, try to make it a ritualistic practice. Whether it’s once a day, once a week, or once a month the important thing is to just keep at it even if you have nothing to write, even if it’s an exercise in producing garbage.
For every great text out there there’s an ocean of miscellany that went into the trash bin or manifested as (e.g. hacker news comments). You’ll often come to something significant during the act of writing. The only thing you really need to master is getting into a state in which you don’t censor yourself, you’re comfortable with facing your deep buried demons, with your own ignorance, and your desires. Once you do that, the content will flow naturally. Then put your editor hat on and decide what to publish, what should remain private and what should be destroyed.
Thinking is conducted through material processes, like putting a pen to paper or staring at birds. Ever since Descartes, there’s an error people tend to make in divorcing thought/their mental life from their embodied existence—the two are not separable.
When it comes to writing, remember Nike’s motto.
As an illustration of this point, none of the sentences in this post were floating around in my head or formulated until I started typing it out. If you had asked me to dictate a response on this topic it would have been entirely different.
"If you had asked me to dictate a response on this topic, it would have been entirely different."
There is a risk very few of the supporters of "writing as a way of thinking" talk about, and that is you write what during writing feels the right thing to write, but not what you wanted to write.
I am quite baffled by the vibe of the comment section here.
The author explains why they do not feel like writing a technical blog, and those are (1) they have nothing interesting/new to say, (2) they are not a good programmer, and (3) it is not a good CV building.
I don't know about (1) and (2), but I respect the author's self-assessment, and I agree with (3), overall a technical blog is not a good CV builder, although there could be a confounder at play here, in the sense that who could write a popular tech blog is someone who has enough skills not be worried about having any other items to be added to the CV, like writing a blog.
But the general vibe is that somewhat the author is wrong in their self-assessment.
They should write for themselves and then publish or not publish—— similar to the love letter sent to the boy/girlfriend who dumped you that you should not send, but you should burn——or write for helping someone that in 3 years are gonna find themselves with the same problem, or that writing it down helps organize the scattered thoughts in one's mind (like people who are not writing those thoughts down are like pilgrims lost in the darkest night with no oil for their lamp) or they need a boost of confidence, because they surely have something to share.
And many are forgetting the opportunity cost: it takes time to write, and energy, and not getting any view is frustrating and maybe not a game one wants to play.
Like someone shared their thoughts on why they should not upload their salsa dancing on YT (they are not very good salsa dancers, they have nothing to teach, and nobody cares they salsa dance at Farmers Insurance where they work) and people started saying that no, you should upload to YT because maybe you are better than you think you are (why?), you may have some unique way of explaining the third step or whatever (really), it is the best way to find a romantic partner (and?) and who tells you that your skip-level manager at Farmers has a daughter who dances competitively and you may find through a common passion and through the grapevine of family a better connection with "leaders", which could give you an increase of 1k per year (before taxes)?
I, after having read the blog post and coming from a perspective of respect of the author, agree they should not write a technical blog. I don't see any reason for now, tomorrow who knows.
Author at some level would like to blog ("I would love to follow the steps of my idols") but then finds reasons to rationalize a priori why it's not worth it.
These reasons might be valid and it's perfectly fine to drop this arbitrary goal and to go pursue something else. But I think that's not necessarily easier to do, it's difficult to control what we are drawn to. And deciding what to do based on a self-assessment about your chances of success is just one heuristic from many others. Welcoming serendipity and knowing you'll get better at it should be considered too. As Steve Job said, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."
This blog post also reads like wanting the benefits of the outcome without the risk of "failing" or the efforts of the process. I'd argue there are only upsides to trying: so little to lose VS. so much to gain. You get to choose when to stop trying, worst-case scenario is having wasted time exploring some things that were interesting to you anyway.
This post hits hard. It expresses exactly how I feel. There are days when I say to myself “hey, I got things to say” but they I remember that I’m not an exceptional engineer and probably someone else said it.
There’s another problem. I’m not comfortable writing in English, I want to use my mother tongue - Bulgarian. It would mean zero audience for the blog. Also, most English terms have funny translations or don’t have at all.
I think, for a lot of people, "I don't have anything interesting to say" could more accurately be translated into, "I'm afraid of finding out something I believe is interesting actually isn't to anyone else."
Rarely do people genuinely think, and operate, as if nothing they could articulate will be relevant to anyone else. It's literally the entire purpose of communication.
I completely empathize, and it's why I held off on it for so long.
But recently I quit my job and decided to start in order to keep myself accountable. I've been pleasantly surprised by what I've gotten out of it so far and wrote down my thoughts here:
I do not understand the concept of self-accountability. If I say I'm going to do something for myself and not do it then what? If it is the self "shame" (for lack of a better word) for not performing/completing the goal/task I set for myself it will have to go to the end of the line of "self shame"; a very long line with many far more shameful things I've done/haven't done/started-and-not-completed through out my 51+ years.
I do envy those who can hold themselves accountable and get things done.
Another way of putting it is that for me, blogging is giving me some structure right now that I find useful.
Blogging daily enforces some measure of discipline on my time. Then I build the habit of putting serious effort into something every day, even in the absence of a job. The fact that it's intrinsic is also quite empowering. And if I want to be satisfied with what I write, I need to push myself and write about things that are difficult for me, i.e. new or complex ideas. Especially since I'm using this time to reflect, that means thinking about my values, my work habits, and my long-term career goals. When I look at my cumulative posts I can see that I've done some creative and satisfying. And these posts are also artifacts I can share with others, so there's a social element too.
In the absence of that, especially with my new glut of free time, I could see myself falling into the trap of not really doing anything. Maybe not immediately, but over time. And while that's certainly not a bad place to be, it's not where I want to go. So there's a protective element to this too; if I break the routine, I'll know immediately that something has gone astray.
For me, self-accountability isn't about shame. It's realizing that in my better & stronger moments, I identified my goals and what I wanted to accomplish. So now, when it's time to execute (and I'm perhaps in a weaker moment), I trust the previous version of myself and follow my original plan.
I’ve started writing a bit of very niche technical docs that mostly help future me. Then I was looking at my analytics and I’m getting 5-8x more views on those posts (100-200 views a month), compared to my posts about my life, keyboards, other things that people will find mundane.
If this writing is what the author brings to the table, I think they are more than capable of writing a useful blog. And with more writing, it will only get better.
> It feels as if I should have great things to say about... stuff... and yet I don't. Every opinion I have is a copy of a copy of a copy of the first 5 top-level comments on a reddit-slash-hacker-news comment section.
Almost everything that's said or written is a copy of a copy of a copy. But as a reader, your 5th level copy might be the first time I'm encountering that particular idea. If only one person says something, the chances of me finding it are negligible. If a thousand people say the same thing, it significantly increases the chances of me finding it.
I have a blog but I write on it very infrequently. I definitely would like to write more.
I think the blog format is a little limiting - the idea that it is serially published on a regular schedule, ideally sticks to one topic.
I think what I really want is more like the old style "homepage", where you'd have a collection of links to different random projects you wanted to share. Like here's my catalog of the best 1970s rock albums, over here is a tutorial on how I built my own automated plant watering system, and so on in that fashion.
I also don't have many interesting things to say. I also don't think I'm a particularly good programmer.
But yet I have a blog. Mostly to improve my writing. And to give me an additional reason to explore a new topic once in a while. It's also a nice notebook.
If I get a reader that's good. But building a high profile blog does not have to be the main goal.
If you don't have anything interesting to say, I recommend playing devil's advocate and becoming an internet troll. Once you decouple interesting things to say from your actual opinions and feelings (which as mentioned, are often boring and just regurgitations of the top most popular comments), it becomes quite liberating to write about a lot of things. You can now take any position, any angle you want, on a specific topic, and have no obligation to stick to your own personal thoughts. Your personal feelings often hold you back from actually saying something interesting and novel, since most of our feelings are often just carbon copies of whatever the most popular sentiment in a community is.
It will also vastly improve your writing style. You can choose a blunt inflammatory approach to writing, or take a more subtle passive aggressive style that skirts Poe's Law. Either way, when you do this for a long time you will really get to learn what pushes people's buttons and gets views. It's intoxicating to see long threads of discussion spawned from something you say, and it becomes a game to figure out how you can spawn huge discussions using as few words as possible.
When you write from an opposing view of your actual opinions you also end up learning a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of your opinion based on the replies people write. In fact, a good way to often learn about a topic is to say something blatantly wrong and watch as people come to correct you with hard hitting facts and arguments. You can later use these same arguments in your own genuine debates with other people!
Honestly, there's a lot of surprising benefits for a writer trolling around on the internet, but the downside is that it seeps toxicity into communities, since the people you troll tend to believe you are a true believer of what you say, and when they take you seriously it tends to brew pointless animosity. I often say trolling is for people who just love to write (about anything!) and genuine internet discussions are for those who love to be right.
I found Kernighan's book quite riveting. If you want the short version (this might spoil some of the book) this talk is quite something: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o
Imagine all you can read about Networking is RFCs, because nobody has anything interesting to add because it's all in those cryptic (some of them at least) RFCs!
FB and Twitter don't require subject lines. I think this is one of the biggest factors in their attraction for writing (ignoring social aspects). Facebook and most other social media gives a simple writing prompt "what's up?". There's no need to plan out the post or give it a title. This is the same UX as text messages/messaging over e-mail. You can just write a message.
The implied requirement and/or UI requiring a subject line or title to a post or e-mail is a pain in the ass. People don't want to metacognate on what they're trying to say. They just want to type out a thought or ask a question.
Blog software tends to enforce things like a subject/title because it often generates a URL from it. Facebook et al don't give a shit about such things. A post is just the latest and it gets assigned an ID number.
Even the HN favorite RSS suffers from this because it really wants entries to have titles. They're not technically necessary but most reader software uses titles for UI elements. The implied requirement to title everything I think creates a higher barrier of entry than most people want to deal with.
Even this post I'm typing, if I had to title it I'd probably not bother. I have something to say but having to think up a contextual title for it would be a waste of time and serve no benefit to the point I'm trying to make.
Now, there are too many contents online (both good and bad), and I always felt "someone must have written about it somewhere."
A few years back, I began to write again but this time, I write for myself, family, and friends. I no longer care about who reads or visits my blog(s). I have no analytics, no comments, no nothing.
Not as frequent as 15+ years ago but now I write our family stories, collect and document things I'm inspired by, aspire to be, etc on our blog(s). I'm even writing my memoir so I can read it later in life. This is a fun one, trying to remember early/younger years friends. Write about the adventures with the friends who have died, organizing search effort for friends whom I have lost touch and then finding them in places where Internet is still a luxury. If you just sit still for a while, you began to realize your life is an adventure.
I also write a lot on physical pen/paper too. I have one special paper notebook dedicated to my daughters. It is not hidden but is usually around my desk, and I write as and when I feel like or prompted by incidents. I want it to be written in my handwriting for them to read, now and in the future.