How to start blogging

Dear new developer,

I was asked about how to start blogging during the Q&A portion of a talk I gave. I had offhandedly recommended blogging as a great way to make connections and to be both credible and findable (locatable?) when looking for a job.

I started to spout off an answer using WordPress, and the questioner said “what about medium?”. And I stopped short. The correct answer is was “whatever is easiest”. I realized that this needed a bit more explanation, hence this letter.

So, the first thing to realize is that almost no one will read it, especially at the beginning. Why would you write if no one will read it? Well, to clarify your thought, to provide a written record of what you’ve done, and because, if you keep at it, Google will find it. Google is great at the long tail, so if you write something that is of interest to anyone, eventually people will find it.

Some numbers. This blog had the following stats for the first six months:

• Sep: 8 posts/5 visitors
• Oct: 11 posts/20 visitors
• Nov: 6/15
• Dec: 9/219
• Jan: 8/221
• Feb: 9/223

For the first month, I wrote more posts than visitors! And for the first three months, I had 25 posts and only 40 visitors. If you aren’t ready and willing to commit for a fair bit of time, your blog will become one of those sad blogs that I occasionally run across with three great posts, then one post six months later with the title “I haven’t posted in a while…” and then nothing.

Now, if that’s what you want, that’s ok (everyone can blog for their own reasons) but if you are looking for credibility and locatability, well, that kind of blog accomplishes neither.

So, commit for six months. I do this by:

• writing out 20-30 titles of blog posts I want to write. If I can’t come up with that many blog post titles, I am not passionate enough about the topic to stick with it. Better to find out before investing the effort.
• Watch for interesting concepts and mailing myself whenever I have a possible blog post idea. Then I can search my email when I have time to write but no ideas. (You can do the same with a spreadsheet, doc, trello board or whatever. Just capture the inspiration when you can.)
• Make some posts easy by doing excerpts or commentary (about half of the posts on this blog are excerpts or guest posts).
• Settle on a consistent schedule. No need to announce it, though. (Some people do it daily, for which I have mad respect.)
• Write blog posts ahead of time and schedule them out. When the muse is present, it can be easy to jam out a few posts. When the muse is absent, it is a relief to not need write, but still be able to deliver to previously mentioned consistent schedule.
• Realize that some of the posts will be mediocre. It is embarrassing to put out poor content. Don’t do that, but some posts will be better than others. Volume is key, and the longer you do it, the better the posts will get.

As far as the actual writing tool, use whatever is comfortable and easy. That may be wordpress.com, may be medium, may be netlify + hugo. Whatever it is, don’t let the technology get in the way of the writing. Especially if you are a developer, it can be more fun to be in weeds tweaking your blog deployment pipeline (at least, that’s really fun for me) but that will distract you from the main goal, which is to create good content.

My final tip is to share on online communities. Don’t only share your own work, but definitely share it. Which community? Well, find out where your people are. There are a lot of communities out there, whether tech specific like Hacker News, general purpose and public like Twitter, or focused and private, like the HangOps Slack. (Sharing is how I was able to break through in December above.)

Doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you are engaged in the community and the topic of your blog is of interest to the community. These communities are well aware of the traffic they can bring and are often wary of newcomers. I have gotten a few scoldings when I posted things that I thought were interesting, but were not in line with the community. That’s OK, just accept the community judgement, acknowledge the mistake, and do better.

Blogging is a great way to amplify your voice, display your expertise and share your knowledge. Set yourself up for success when you start one.

Sincerely,

Dan