1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they communicate well? If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years that's still a big boost over candidates with nothing like that at all. In a competitive market that could be the boost you need to make it from the resume review to the first round.
3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
4. It's a great way to help establish credibility. If someone asks you about X and you have a blog entry about X from five years ago you can point them to that.
5. Building a blog is really fun! It used to be one of the classic starter projects for new web developers, I think that needs to come back. It's a fun project and one that's great to keep on hacking on long into the future.
Notably none of the above reasons require your blog to attract readers! There's a ton of value to be had even if nobody actually reads the thing.
As a general rule, assume nobody will read your blog unless you actively encourage them to. That's fine. What matters isn't the quantity of readers, it's their quality. I'd rather have a piece read by just a single person that leads to a new opportunity for me than 1,000 people who read it and never interact with me ever again.
If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable. I've been blogging since 2002 and most of the opportunities in my career came from people I met via blogging. Today I get invited to all sorts of interesting events because I have a prominent blog covering stuff relating to AI and LLMs.
But I do honestly think that a blog is a powerful professional tool even if nobody else is reading it at all.
If you want to give it a go I've written a few things that might be useful:
About point 2: I have yet to have a job interview, in which the interviewer has even taken a look at my website. Well, actually I don't know that, of course, but what I want to say is, that none so far showed any sign or indication of having taken a look, and as a consequence also no sign or indication of knowing anything about any of my showcased projects. In 95% of the cases it was just that they want to do their one thing, their one test, and not consider the candidate as a person at all. No time for that these days, I guess.
Also a hiring manager. I always do. For me a good personal site is a huge step towards a phone interview. I look for things people do not because anyone told them to do (college projects, internships, work), but because they were excited about it. That initiative and excitement is what will set you apart from the other 100 resumes that look exactly like yours.
I hope you can "infect" others with this kind of view, so that more people adopt it.
My CV currently also includes a link to my repositories and a page briefly describing some projects that got anywhere. Far from all of my 100 or so personal free time projects get finished, but some do, and those are described and linked in my CV and on my website.
At least I do get interviews, which must mean at least something, and sometimes it's just the role that is not fitting. Often it is their tech stack and they do not believe in engineers learning things on the job, looking for a perfect match. Sometimes it was some test that they do, that presumes some knowledge about some library or that is some specific leetcode thingy, that I wouldn't code that way anyway, if I had the choice.
Please no, I don’t want people making blogs just because they want to get a job from it at some point, they should be making blogs because they love to blog.
Imagine everyone having some cookie cutter blog, just a standard part of a resume.
At least pre AI it was easy to identify if a blog was done due to interest or for self advertisment.
I haven't been recruiting recently but goes it's even simpler to identify blogs full of loveless AI slop and people who care about a topic. (Even if they use AI for language assistance etc)
Topics, which details being presented, frequency, ...
Just look how it goes with GitHub everyone has some BS repos and then also they spam projects to get contributions for CVs.
Hacktober was the worst but I think it went away because of BS spam contributions.
CVE and in general security issues reporting has this issue nowadays where everyone wants to get CVE on their name to have it for CV. It is worst stuff ever.
That's wild. I first typically LinkedIn search someone, and then web search someone, even before I get too deep into the resume (they've already been filtered and ranked for me).
In the past I got a job I had for 8 years through my blog, a startup that eventually sold....
So, it's been pretty good for me, and doesn't actually take that much extra effort on top of the learning you do daily working in tech.
Depends on the company type. Seems like FAANG and companies trying to act like FAANG just follow a strict formulaic process and your portfolio or blog is kinda irrelevant there.
For startups and small companies I think it makes a huge difference.
At one job I was told explicitly I was hired mostly because the hiring manager liked my website - I wasn't the only one that passed the interview process and so my website was why I was chosen. He liked how minimalist it was.
At another, one of the engineers found a bug on my website and my interview was to pair program a fix with him.
When I'm in charge of hiring I strongly prefer candidates that have some kind of web presence that lets me structure the interview more towards what they've presented about themselves.
Also I have gotten clients that originally found me because they googled "how to rent a motorcycle in Taiwan" and I rank #1 for that search apparently.
> At one job I was told explicitly I was hired mostly because the hiring manager liked my website - I wasn't the only one that passed the interview process and so my website was why I was chosen. He liked how minimalist it was.
I intentionally made my website very minimalistic, using only HTML and CSS. Also fully responsive using modern CSS layouts and even made everything composable, avoiding media queries for specific widths. Kind of an experiment, but very minimalistic. So what you write makes me think: "If only someone took a look at my website and had that mindset!!"
Well, I will keep my website, maybe one day it will amount to something.
I'm involved in screening CVs and interviewing candidates. If there is so much as a email adress that indicates a personal domain, I look it up to see whether behind it there might be something like a personal website. When the CV is good and Github repositories etc. are mentioned I also take a brief glance there. But indeed, it is very rather rare that I make the content a part of the interview.
As a senior I'm doing tech part of interviews sometimes. If there is a link to blog/gh/whatever in CV - I always check it. I may not say anything during interview, but I'm looking there.
But… having (not so often updated) blog myself - I will try to change my behavior in future and mention it somehow during interview ;)
You likely are interviewing at big companies. I have worked across the industry and the smaller the team the more they look at my website work etc. some even asked about game reviews on my blog during the interview.
However, even at big companies it can be useful depending on context but you have to bring it up in relation to why you are a fit for the job. Genuine enthusiasm goes a long way especially in the dry corporate world.
Actually, no, I applied at small to medium sized companies and also some startups. But these days they are thinking they must use the same processes as the big players, it seems.
I would actually prefer working in a startup again, where I can still influence technical implementation and guide things into good paths, compared to working as a tiny cog in a huge machinery of a big company. Of course, a lot depends on the team. It might be possible to be part of a great team in a big company, that is in charge of some aspect of the whole, and having more influence over how things are done there.
Only question is, how long I can comfortably hold out, not doing a shitty job, until I see that signal flaring up, because they seem far and few between, so far. It might also just be a Germany thing, this kind of hiring, that is blind to the genuinely curious and creative people.
I like Point No. 4. By now, I have enough articles to point to when people ask the same questions over and over. I have been asked, “Do you always have a blog post for these questions?”
Another advice or a deduction that I learnt from reading biographies and many historical books is — write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived.
I really like that. It's absolutely true, I constantly find older stuff on my blog that I had entirely forgotten about and it's always interesting to get back in touch with past-me.
Oh, absolutely true about finding stuff, and I go like, “Ah! I wrote about that.” I got my search working (abandoned for a long time) and a list of all post archives just so I can find them easier.
Btw, I have had a to-do item for quite a while to copy your blog’s yearly archive link style in the footer. I haven’t figured out a way to make it simpler and I don’t have to deal with it for a long time. :-)
Past-me was so dumb. Asked a lot of rookie questions. It's the one little piece of evidence that maybe I have actually learned a little something in the past 10 years.
"[...] write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived."
How bizarre. Well, memory spaces are just that, I suppose. I write diaries and letters since before I entered school and my younger self does feel anything but a stranger to me; many of my memories are as lucid to me as they were all those decades ago, both life-changing as well as trivial ones.
Depends on the person, I suppose? I have some strong memories from decades ago, but most of my normal memories of events fade within 5 years or so. The memories I do have from a decade ago are certainly not lucid but a bit blurry and sparse on details. I often wish I remembered better.
Probably. In my case long-term memory seems to be really strong down male side of my family so when I read my old stuff from 20+ years ago I remember it and know it was me, just a little different like 'damn, we don't wear clothes like that anymore' when you look at old pictures. The styles/culture/times change you are in and so you adapt to them, but you are still you. I hear this commonly though that some people don't feel like the old them is same person at all.
For me: I have felt a continual sense of self since around kindergarten, before that memory is a little episodic (my earliest is going to hospital to visit my mom and sister after she was born, when I was age 2) but I feel the same 'me' in memories from kindergarten til now over 30 years later. I also do stuff like pick up and start reading a book, put it down, and then go back and finish from where I left off 3-4 years later. I've met a few other people that do that as well, but it's a little uncommon I think?
On the flip side my working memory has always been really bad. My attachment to memory blanks under stress, some people will relate in things like public speaking. I remember in high school forgetting entire marching band drill one time and having to improvise because I stress blanked. The memory is there when this happens it's like it stops streaming to RAM, intuition takes over based on what it sees not what is known.
What is incredibly useful, and this I always felt is for personal writing only (diary/journal)... writing allows for capturing a state of your own thinking/feelings at a time. I would often write to myself when major events happened (good or bad) and then later on I could interpret from the strong feelings what I was going through and see if I handled them or could handle them better. You don't need editing passes for this, it should capture your raw state. Probably good to do this if your memories fade as well, but I don't know. I will probably burn some of my old writing, things that have served their purpose. Apparently it makes you feel relieved doing it and some cultures have this concept.
And it's very easy to start with something that is also "social":
- https://write.as - a https://writefreely.org instance that also syncs with Mastodon, so people can see/discover/subscribe/ comment on your posts without extra hassle of setting up comments or other privacy invading tools.
This is all true but I'm not sure about establishing credibility with a blog, especially when an LLM can help fudge the details.
I like your idea of blogging about TILs. There are shallow posts about TILs(plenty on medium) and then there are posts that mention TILs along with specific gotchas they faced and workarounds on the topic. Those saved me hours of searching/debugging on couple of occasions and I'm glad that they did that.
You are mostly right. But I suspect that a good writer will remain good [or even better] with LLM's. In my experience the bad ones are detected immediately.
Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine with blogs not having a monetary element at all.
I wonder how much of that mercenary approach to blogging today resulted ultimately from the 2008 crisis. It feels like there was less pressure to make ends meet, and consequently no pressure to hustle, before that. And maybe it is also the influencer self-branding culture of Instagram being seen as the default internet, so when people do alt-internet things they carry over those same values knowingly or unknowingly.
Additional factors that come to mind: the slow realization that you could be writing for an audience of one (yourself) after a brief surge of "famous bloggers"; and the rise of other forms of writing (social media, etc) that at least give you the illusion of an immediate audience. "Engagement metrics" and so on -- even if they represent the opposite of attention.
I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere, but doesn't necessarily stay bottled up in the mind of the would-have-been blogger. Even while pseudo-blogging platforms like Substack are having something of an upswing of esoteric low-audience content.
And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.
Just as a simple example, I have a once-in-a-while newsletter+blog on a niche topic, and I could get way more eyeballs if I'd just rephrase things as a Reddit post, but I'm nostalgic about it living its own life on the Free-ish Web. Or, I suppose, this comment right here, which could just as well be on a personal blog with a "backlink" to yours.
> And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.
There are other ways to monetize, which doesn't depend on a lot of eyeballs. If you write high quality niche content and sell related products or services, then each eye ball can be worth a lot.
> Just as a simple example, I have a once-in-a-while newsletter+blog on a niche topic, and I could get way more eyeballs if I'd just rephrase things as a Reddit post, but I'm nostalgic about it living its own life on the Free-ish Web. Or, I suppose, this comment right here, which could just as well be on a personal blog with a "backlink" to yours.
I've been thinking lately about still posting things to various places like here and Reddit but compiling them later on and posting them to my website (likely with a link to where I posted them originally). That seems like a good middle ground for me and would enable me to build up a decent resource for myself and others, if I'm up for cleaning up the texts to provide or remove context as necessary.
Much of this idea of mine is from a desire to archive and pull together more of the stuff I've put effort into that's spread all over the web.
>I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere
That's been true of me. A paragraph or three that I would once have done as a blog now slip neatly and easily into social media of various sorts. Going to try to do something about that next year but this year ended up crazy for various reasons.
Social media might be getting less attractive for that, though. Compare Reddit now to ten years ago, and you can see that even on more serious subreddits, everyone’s comments have become very short, often little more than a single line. If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing.
>If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing.
As one should. The rando who spams a discussion thread with an impenetrable wall of text is like that guy who uses their "question" at the end of an in-person panel discussion to ramble incoherently for three minutes. Yes, here we can scroll past it, but it's still presumptious and annoying. This is not primary content (that's at the top). Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For my part I try to remember that fact - and get to the point.
In a forum, the discussion IS primary content. That's the problem: Reddit has shifted away from being a discussion forum toward an endless-scroll content feed.
> Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For my part I try to remember that fact - and get to the point.
Kind of an odd turn of logic. If being a nobody devalues your anecdotes or tangents, then it equally devalues your point. If, conversely, your point can be valuable in and of itself, then your anecdotes and tangents can be valuable in and of themselves too.
> Yes, here we can scroll past it, but [...] This is not primary content (that's at the top).
Incidentally, you don't have to scroll past anything to reach the content at the top of the page. It's at the top of the page.
My point is that the primary content at the top of the page has a byline. It's already vouched for, somewhat, by the reputation of the domain, or publication, or author. We have an idea of whether to spend our time investigating further. By contrast my rando comment (or yours) has nothing to recommend it but some opaque username. That's why I (and I'm betting most people) will scroll right past the "autistic weirdo"'s wall of text. And why I personally choose to try not to write that text.
Two ordinary paragraphs like one would find in any serious publication, are now enough to make an “impenetrable wall of text”?
You also overlook the fact that many Reddit posts are not links to content. For example, they could be text-post questions posed to a community in order for the OP to receive guidance. This recent culture discouraging substantial discussion about things that are complex and can’t be abbreviated, makes the site less useful that way.
There's certainly a general trend towards shorter. At my last company, I was involved with our content folks (and created a fair bit myself). In the course of my time there, longer (say 3,000 word) whitepapers basically went away and most of the other content such as video almost universally got shorter based on monitoring what content people viewed/read and for how long.
I suppose if I were younger that might be of interest. I'm not looking for opportunities at this point. I live in a small town, I have probably one of the best (local) tech jobs I've ever had, not strictly on pay but the pay is enough and the overall chill level and quality of life is something I would not give up.
I've sometimes thought about blogging but for what? I'm not interested in promoting myself or my "brand" and I can't write about anything that someone else with much deeper expertise hasn't already written about.
My blog is probably more detrimental to my “brand” than helpful. I also couldn’t care less about the self-promotion or monetization aspect or anything of that sort. I find writing and the act of creating to be a type of catharsis. I write exclusively for me.
If you feel the occasional urge to blog - maybe just be self indulgent about it? I get a strange sense of satisfaction from twiddling with the CSS on a rainy afternoon. Just my random 2p that nobody asked for :)
To have notable income from blogging requires a very different frequency and posts which attract a broader audience (unless I go really deep and paywall it for experts) That turns blogging from keeping notes and sharing experience to a Job in itself. A Job I for one wouldn't like.
That's a trend I've noticed as well over the past few years. It somehow feels like it's becoming increasingly “important” to make money from whatever you do on the internet. The idea that you can just create things because you enjoy it, or because you want to share what you've made with others in the hope that they might like it and offer interesting feedback, seems to be fading away.
I mean, I get it: the economic situation is tough for many people, and earning money matters. But the focus on creating something simply for the sake of sharing it seems to be disappearing more and more.
I have seen it said in hacker circles that people in their teens and twenties now are not just more reluctant to share stuff for free like FOSS, but they are even outright suspicious of such endeavors. To a generation who grew up on platforms and apps that maximize engagement for maximum profit, a community that doesn’t do that looks like a bunch of weirdos, maybe a cult.
I'm not sure I've seen that personally although most of the tech folk I know are at least somewhat older.
In fairness, I do think "side hustles" and the like have become much more normalized as the default. And even if the odds are poor, there are least enough anecdotes of Substack authors, influencers, and the like making enough money to perk many people's interest.
This post really resonates with me, especially points 1, 3, and 5.
I started blogging in 2001. I have old articles lying around that are completely obsolete - about PEAR, Swing, GWT, Subversion, etc.
I did it to share without having any idea who was reading or not. Probably nobody back then.
But it became a habit. Beyond tech topics, I started blogging about broader subjects: organization, hiring, salaries, company building.
And it's incredible how much I relied on it later as a sort of documentation, especially for everything related to company building. It's so valuable to re-read why we made certain decisions in the past. And it's also so valuable to be able to point new colleagues to that knowledge base.
And technically, I had fun. I went through Joomla, self-hosted WordPress, wordpress.com. I built my own plugins. Then I developed my own open source static blog generator (bloggrify.com) in the Nuxt ecosystem. That's when I created an English version of my blog.
Then I started feeling the need to share differently. I had the impression that blogging was becoming outdated, that younger generations weren't reading anymore. So I tried video format on YouTube.
I really enjoyed video production - there's still so much to learn: equipment, techniques, new tools.
But I realized that each format has its pros and cons. It's so much easier to update text when it becomes obsolete. It's also so much faster to produce. Video is so hard to make.
So I got back into writing and even took it further by creating a blogging platform (writizzy.com).
In short, I learned a lot because I documented everything I did, which forced me to dig deeper into each topic to avoid saying nonsense.
I also learned a lot because I wanted to test approaches, make videos, learn to build a static site generator and many other things, purely for the sake of learning.
Today, one piece of advice I give to every senior dev is to take the time to write. Doesn't matter if it's to publish somewhere or not. But to lay out your ideas, dig deeper into them, get perspective.
>1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
>3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
These are generally why I blog. I write the articles with an audience in mind, because I don't know a concept if I can't explain it cogently. And also I actually tend to refer back to my blog for my own reference surprisingly regularly. For example, I wrote an article on installing Debian on a PC Engines APU over the serial interface, and then getting the Unifi Controller running. Every so often when I update the Debian install on that box, or decide to change OSes on a different APU I'll refer to that article.
You wouldn't think that that would be so difficult but it was a surprisingly baroque process.
> If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years
Oh hey, that's me! This post might actually encourage me to get back on top of things. Not only do I have two articles (more recent than 5 years though), one of them has a glaring error that is somewhat foundational to what it's supposed to be about. I have to fix that, as well as my broken RSS feed, and get my git link re-directed to my self-hosted forge, and update all my remotes, remove some defunct links and menu options, and then decide which of my 68 (yes, 68!) blog drafts I want to focus on publishing next. Now that I've listed it out, I bet I can get all that done over the break.
I make a point of hitting "publish" when I'm still not entirely happy with what I've written, because I know that the alternative is a folder full of drafts and nothing published at all.
Nobody who reads your stuff will ever know how good it could have been if you kept on polishing it.
My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before Youtube or Netflix took off.
And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a blog post.
MetaARPA tier membership (quarterly fee) is required to have HTTPS on your personal website - personal sites hosted on the main BSD cluster don’t have it.
I do this too (not the personal domain bit) but one thing to be aware of is that Google doesn't seem to index these sites unless you feed it each URL manually. Doesn't autodiscover, doesn't read a submitted sitemap.
Not a showstopper for me since I don't expect anyone to be interested anyway, but might be for some.
Given the tiny cost of running a blog, especially if you have a domain name, is it worth the saving? Its not even much work if you use a static site builder.
Reliability? It took me around 15 minutes to create a site with Claude Code using GitHub Pages with custom domain and somebody else is taking care that it is always running. What is the alternative?
My feeling about GitHub Pages is that it is not unreasonable just to forget about the site. For any cheap shared hosting I would psychologically feel the need to monitor the site somehow, periodically check that the credit card works etc.
For me, there is a large relative (percentual) difference in the perceived cognitive load. Perhaps not a huge actual difference, but when you are running tens of projects, everything counts.
Now I am not talking about actual reality but the psychological effect. It might be that some shared hosting site is in fact more reliable than GitHub Pages.
Obviously, a blog that you just forget is not that useful, but last site I created using this method was an advertisement site for a book. I have several blogs where I write occasionally.
I recently setup a little blog on tilde.club. They had a built I blogging tool in the CLI, but I wasn’t a huge fan. It gives some hosting space as well and supports php, so I vibe coded a little something that lets me throw markdown files with a date as the file name into a folder. Once created, it posts to the blog. Right now it’s just one long running page (and individual posts can be viewed/linked). I’m debating between adding an archive or just only showing a certain number of posts and letting them age out (unless linking to the specific post). I also have php generating an RSS feed based on the markdown files, so they just works without any fuss.
Of course my biggest issue is that I have started and deleted more blogs than I can count, so I don’t have any useful history, like I would if I would have stuck with one thing for the last 20 years.
Believe it or not, Blogger still exists and is free. I did some research when I was looking to spin up a blog for professional purposes. I ended up just rolling it into my personal blog though, for various reasons, I haven't done a lot with it yet. Project for the new year.
You can hate on Google all you like but it hasn't been killed by Google yet and has been a long time--and is simple, adequate, and free even if it doesn't handle all the more advanced use cases.
>Biggest downside I know of: Wordpress is too much learning curve & overhead for a simple personal blog.
That was the conclusion I came to when I was muddling through various options last year. I had a Blogger blog already and decided to just roll in whatever professional content I wanted to add, which was the right solution for me. It helped that various folks I knew didn't bother having hard boundaries behind personal and professional content and that worked for me as well.
Thank You! This lead to me login and rediscover I actually had a blog 15 years ago.
The thing that stopped me was much like what you said, learning curve and too much friction. Right now I have bearblog, mataroa.blog and nicheless, all with their own strength and flaws.
In Digital Ocean you can host up to 3 static sites for free, includes HTTPS, your own domain names and automatic deployment from GitHub repos. Look for their "app platform"
You could publish it as an onion service! Apart from keeping your computer running and an active internet connection, there isn't any other recurring cost.
GitHub Pages gives you a neat URL - yourname.github.io - and is free forever and even lets you run GitHub Actions for free to operate a static site builder.
I enjoy having a place to write that I can call my own, and it is a major flex when a topic comes up for a client like, say, migrating giant Subversion projects to Git, and I can whip out [1] and say "ah, I happen to know a thing or two about that".
My old blog posts come up in the first page of search results for niche topics a lot, and it is very satisfying when someone reaches out to say that they benefited from it.
On a side note, after writing frequently for ~12 years, I didn't write anything for the next 6. This discussion came at the right time - it nudged me to publish two posts yesterday.
What are people using to edit entries - because while markdown is fine, a lot of the time I want to be able to drag in screenshots, snippets of other documents like rfcs and so on. So it ends up being easier to make those notes for myself rather than push them into anything publishable.
> 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
ugh, I hate this. Often when doing a search for how to do something I get 100 beginner blogs that cover the absolute basics but have no depth. People who know what they're doing are drowned out.
Struggle quite a bit to share hobby interest via anything including instagram. Might try this. Back to date of html 1.0 and gopher …
I still sad about my favorite go to photography blog was gone dark because of the vendor is sort of gone I guess. Might be we have to live with Buddha worldview - nothing is permanent.
The only time I used AI for writing was when I was cleaning up some reference architectures and needed some fairly boilerplate text for the intro background. But basically don't really use AI; maybe if I did more coding these days.
I started following your blog when you were like, 14. Cool to see you here. I've kept up my blog for 25 years, and you were an inspiration along the way.
The problem for me is, wordpress is a security disaster especially the plugins. I don't want to constantly worry about updating in time. One day too late and you can be screwed. I've seen it happen with other people.
I'm a huge fan of self hosting but internet facing stuff I don't want to run myself but all the commercial blogging services like medium have scummy tracking and analytics built in, or try to get my readers to subscribe to things.
Then I tried substack but they lean too heavily on the "newsletter" paradigm which I hate. Also they are starting to enshittify now too.
I don't mind paying for a service but they always want to double dip in tracking readers and selling subscriptions to them as well. Yuck.
This is where static site generators can be a good option. I’m in the same boat. I don’t have any appetite for self hosting and maintaining some internet-facing application with a web server and a database and a million dependencies in between. So for my personal site, I generate it locally and stick the static files on S3. No database, no servers, no headache.
Agree, static HTML seems the only thing that is at all future-proof. Any hosted blog or platform will have the risk of shutting down or abandonment but if your source is HTML you can host that anywhere, with little setup. Even so I'd keep my posts in a text-based precursor format such as Markdown or Org-Mode. I don't think HTML is going away soon but it's not inconceivable.
Yeah, static site generators solve so many of these problems. There's a lot less that can go wrong if your hosting is entirely static files out of S3 or Cloudflare or nginx or similar.
I mainly use them as a thesaurus and proof reader, and occasionally let VS Code autocomplete finish a sentence for me when I'm writing longer form pieces.
Might be the numbered list of short points that keyed OP. And it's actually a great communication style! So much so that they overtrained LLMs to produce them. I wonder if we're all going to have to get idiosyncratically slightly worse to avoid the suspicion in the future.
1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they communicate well? If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years that's still a big boost over candidates with nothing like that at all. In a competitive market that could be the boost you need to make it from the resume review to the first round.
3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
4. It's a great way to help establish credibility. If someone asks you about X and you have a blog entry about X from five years ago you can point them to that.
5. Building a blog is really fun! It used to be one of the classic starter projects for new web developers, I think that needs to come back. It's a fun project and one that's great to keep on hacking on long into the future.
Notably none of the above reasons require your blog to attract readers! There's a ton of value to be had even if nobody actually reads the thing.
As a general rule, assume nobody will read your blog unless you actively encourage them to. That's fine. What matters isn't the quantity of readers, it's their quality. I'd rather have a piece read by just a single person that leads to a new opportunity for me than 1,000 people who read it and never interact with me ever again.
If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable. I've been blogging since 2002 and most of the opportunities in my career came from people I met via blogging. Today I get invited to all sorts of interesting events because I have a prominent blog covering stuff relating to AI and LLMs.
But I do honestly think that a blog is a powerful professional tool even if nobody else is reading it at all.
If you want to give it a go I've written a few things that might be useful:
- What to blog about: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ - Today I learned and write about your projects
- My approach to running a link blog - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ - aka write about stuff you've found