In You should start a blog today, I argue that many people would benefit from writing a blog. I’ve later refined the message and shared it across different platforms like a meetup talk Why developers should write blog posts (talk).
Blog and document for yourself
A great way and reason to start blogging is to document what you learn. As developers we’re constantly learning new things: we face a problem that we don’t know the solution to → we research from the web, docs, colleagues and friends in communities → we solve the problem.
A lot of people stop there. I encourage people to continue by documenting what you learned. This helps make sure you actually understand what you learned. (see Explaining it helps you understand it). Once you have then documented it for yourself, share it on a blog for the benefit of both the other people as well as yourself.
While you document what you learn and share it, you tap into the collective wisdom and experiences of the community. In Learning in public, Nicole van der Hoeven puts it very well:
When you learn in public, throwing out a single simple question and listening to responses helps you skip a lot of the trial and error in those steps.
You are taking advantage of an entire community’s knowledge and wisdom instead of relying on your own (or lack thereof).”
Documenting for yourself is the easiest way to get started as well. You don’t need to force yourself to come up with topics nor worry about being an authority or experienced enough to write about it. Write about what you’ve done and learn to document them for yourself and you can bypass those common worries.
If you like Advent of Code, one way to get started with technical blogging is to write about your solutions like I’ve done for years.
As an added bonus, over time you build a nice collection of recipes for how to solve specific problems, explained by you for you so they become like shortcuts in the future when you don’t have to rediscover everything from documentation or Stack Overflow.
Build a body of work
One day, you’re likely to want to find a new job. Whether it’s your first job in the industry or you’re looking to switch to a new one, having a body of work helps you gain more opportunities.
You can be the best in the world in what you do but if nobody knows it, you’re not getting very far.
In Show your work Austin Kleon shares a lot of good insights into how to build a body of work and how to benefit from it. This one quote resonates with me a lot:
Imagine if your next boss didn’t have to read your résumé because he already reads your blog.
In Know Your Limits: On Surviving Open Source, Carlton Gibson says
Your contributions, your learning, they add up over time.
If you have a public log, that adding up is visible and you can use it
And in his TEDx talk Creative exhaust, the power of being open by default Brad Frost talks about the impact of the side produce of your work can have
Creative exhaust can have value [- -] and in some cases end up being more powerful than the work you do.
It takes a long time to build a good body of technical work so it’s better to start before you need it. But once you have a few years’ worth of quality posts that showcase what you’ve learned, what you’ve done and how you communicate, that body of work starts to work for you.
And since most people don’t do it, you don’t need to be the best in the world in anything to gain visibility and credibility in your industry.
Improve your communication skills
Writing is communication and communication is a crucial skill in the work life. The higher up you climb in the corporate ladder, the more you’ll need to communicate with others. It works the other way around too: improving your communication skills can help you climb that ladder faster.
As developers we write and communicate with others all the time: we give names to variables and functions as we design interfaces, we write commit messages and pull request descriptions and we write documentation. We chat with colleagues in chat platforms and write meeting notes and emails and a bunch of other things in the daily life.
You can survive in working life by being mediocre at communication but good communication skills will definitely help thrive in it. That’s why I recommend students to study creative writing too.
Blogging is an effective way to improve these communication skills. You’re in control of what you write and publish and how often, meaning you don’t have to wait for opportunities at work to show up where you’d get that practice.
Gather a following or build a personal brand
Both of these sound so hustle culture and business talk. It is true however that if one day you wish to start your own business, having people who like what you do and follow your work is a handy bonus when launching something new.
Writing is a consistent way to build this following. Despite what the 1% over-night success stories in social media may make it seem like, it takes such a long time to build that audience. I’ve been writing for years and only recently I’ve seen any significant uptick in readership.
Share knowledge openly
In the ethos of Learning in public, I think it’s a wonderful thing not to hoard information but to share it openly. Blogging with a long tail of reach has unique characteristics in that it can cause ripples through time and space.
Someone across the planet can learn from your experiences or someone - future you included - can learn from you years or decades in the future.
Good news: you don’t need an audience of millions
We live in attention economy and if you want to make a living through social media or Youtube or anything like that, you’d need to get hundreds of thousands of people to follow you.
As a developer writing blog posts you can ignore all that. As I already explained earlier, there are many benefits even if nobody finds and reads your blog as your skills grow.
You can get even more benefits out of blogging even with a real small audience. Maybe it’s a future boss who likes what you read and that gives you a leg up in competition when applying for a job. Or maybe someone learns something from your writing and gets in touch with you and that can lead to different opportunities both personally and professionally.
What others say about the topic
- Just write. by Sara Soueidan
- Blogging is dead. Long live ephemerality. by Morten Rand-Hendriksen
- Be Yourself, Not a Niche by Nat Eliason
- To be whole is the goal by Rach Smith
- Why you should have a blog (and write in it) by Leticia Portella
- Why blog? by Chuck Grimmett
- Building a Digital Homestead, Bit by Brick, by Tom Critchlow
- Into the Personal-Website-Verse by Matthias Ott
- A blog on blogging by Laurie Barth
- Blog about what you want by James
- Why technical people should blog (but don’t) by Major Hayden
- You should blog by Keith Kurson
- The most important blog post by Seth Godin
- Nobody cares about your blog by Alex Molas
- Take Care of Your Blog by Robin Rendle
- Why Have a Personal Site Instead of Social Media? by Kev Quirk