Why it's great to write blog posts | Hacker News Reader

Why it's great to write blog posts

sanderknape.com

187 pointsSanderKnape75 comments

I started my blog 15 years ago. The tactic I take is to write things I think I might need again. I often write very simple blog posts, at first, and then refine those over time. For things that I only do once in a while they're valuable to refer back to. I also get a lot of nice comments from strangers saying things like, "thanks for posting that". It's definitely worth it. I write for myself, first.

" I write for myself, first."

Exactly. I do this on my unknown blog and I love it. If someone else reads it, sure np. For me, it is more of a personal journal/diary of things that I want to write about or remember.

Oh, I do this constantly. One of my blog posts is basically a the distillation of a fairly convoluted installation processes that I stumbled upon, and I go back to it constantly to copy/paste commands out of when things stop working.

I have largely ceased blogging on a personal site, because for things that I might need again, there are other places to post it where it would be more more visible and more useful to other people, and I would be able to find it again too. Information regarding travel and local sites, for example, can go on Wikivoyage or OpenStreetMap. Observations in my own professional field can often be formally published in journals. Useful code snippets can be uploaded to package repositories like Emacs Melpa, etc. While there is a concern with contributing to walled gardens, book reviews might go to Goodreads and some travel information to iOverlander.

That's exactly how I started as well: documenting a project I was doing so the information I gathered was in one place. Just yesterday, I was writing a Makefile, and I referenced my own blog post on the topic to refresh my memory.

It really helps to have your own personal knowledge store, and writing in a way that can be published publicly helps me write clearly. Future me benefits and so do readers who I never expected would stumble onto on my writing.

This. I stopped trying to play the game of getting eyeballs because it would of meant writing crappy listicles instead of the things I actually wanted to write. Instead I focus on building a repository of interesting ideas, projects and the occasional recipe. In this way the blog becomes more of a journal.

Yes, the comments, even if rare, make my day!

Just to add perspective, one reason why it’s _not_ great is the deluge of poor quality information and therefore potential for bias and “the silent majority of experts”, where you can read a bunch of stuff and feel like you know a lot, when in fact you have large knowledge gaps.

Eg. There is tons of info and blogs on machine learning out there. But in my experience, reading a lot of that can lead to a false sense of knowledge, where you seem to know a lot, but actually lack even the fundamentals.

Still, this shouldn’t discourage folks to start blogging!

But it’s an unsolved problem how to balance these concerns.

As the article and comments mention, writing forces you to understand your material really well. I'll offer another perspective: it's useful to approach topics from a less knowledgeable perspective.

The beginner's perspective exposes a lack of information on the topic, especially if the topic is usually covered only by experienced folks. It's also a great way to gather feedback from others who know more about the topic, aiding both you and anyone who reads the resulting discussion/follow ups.

The key is to be transparent with knowing about the topic and explicitly soliciting feedback in areas where you have low confidence. This is the part many armchair experts miss.

There is a huge amount of writing out there by people who clearly do not understand their material really well.

My general rule of thumb for controlling for the quality of the information I output is to:

(1) Talk mostly about things I actually did

(2) Do at least light cross-checking of the main opinions I assert

I'm currently writing some things in the security area, so I've been careful to reference specifications, conference presentations, public documents from security audits, etc. That won't keep me from being wrong, but I'm more likely to be right after going through those extra steps.

The disadvantages listed are exactly the other way round the advantages for authors that encourage some of them to write in the first place: To become clear about contents which one thinks to understand. This prejudice disintegrates exactly when one wants to write down this knowledge.

That's where "content is king" and search engine basics come to rescue. If search engine does its job well, high quality content will always turn up before low quality ones. If a programming article turned up on page-1, then it shouldn't matter whether it was written by someone with or without knowledge gap?

> If search engine does its job well

This is the problem of blogspam. There are plenty of "popular" blogs that are good at SEO and produce little to no good content.

Search engines have no idea whether an article is right, wrong, or irrelevant. In practice, they often do not and cannot do their job well.

I blog, though I tend to try to keep that on a more "professional" level. Stuff I'd want a future employer or potential customer to see. That can be hard to write, though, because it often requires being in a certain mood to write or edit, and sometimes it can be a while before I feel in a "professional enough" mood.

I find it also helps to keep a journal, just for me. Start by recapping what's happened since the last time you wrote, or big events or thoughts on your mind. I often find that I start writing in my journal without any idea what to write about, and I end up having written a thousand words by the time I'm done, most of it without any pain at all. It's not polished in any way, but it's cathartic, and it's practice.

Plus, going back and re-reading what I was thinking, feeling, and doing during critical moments of my life is often inspirational. Some things I handled far better than I remembered, others, well, let's just say I've grown more than I thought. =)

I'm the same way. Well, minus the blog. I've been meaning to put one up since.. well a long time. But in the meantime I've had my own journal, and it's a great place to make sense of things, past and present.

I started writing blog posts when I started my comapny last year. The plan was to wrie one per week, then one every two weeks, then one per months. I settled for one everytime I manage to.

Reasons are mostly time and capacity. Time wise, there are so much things to do that writting a blog post worth publishing is not feasible as often as I wished. Also, worthwhile posts take mental effort. Coming up with a topic, defining the exact content, and finally writting it. Also, my blog posts are about my work. So I don't want to spend every minute thinking about work.

That being said, it is a great excersice, in writting, in thinking problems through and in explaining them. And if some readers, of the few I have, take somehing usefaull away from it, even better!

I certainly agree with the article. Something I have struggled with that has prevented me from writing more, is that I get near 0 eyes on the articles I spend a lot of time writing and thinking through. I'm not sure how to ever get eyes on my blogs, which has me discouraged from continuing writing more. I use Medium and post the articles to HN/twitter, but it hasn't seemed to help any.

This was a huge factor in my hosting a blog on my github.io page. There afaik is no available analytics on such sites available, and I didn't add any into the site. I have no clue how popular my blogposts are or if they have ever even been seen. They remain in a kind of superposition where I have no idea if anyone is reading some more than others or not. This causes me to put the same amount of effort and thought toward writing all of them regardless of topic. Furthermore, it means that I don't get uhh 'online stage fright'. I can assume that literally nobody is reading my blog or knows about it, which gives me a sense of ease I can trick myself into that allows me to write however I want.

Don't focus so much on this need to be seen.

I have a very easy solution to this: I don't have a trackers on my blog, so I remain blissfully unaware.

Your website is http://www.oliverpeat.com/, right? I couldn't find your medium profile from there (though I may have missed it). Could you maybe have your posts also on your website?

Yeah, great idea. I will add them there as well, thanks!

Try finding more specific communities on Reddit. HN is a crapshoot and on Twitter you already need to have a bunch of followers. If you don't get up within the first 10 minutes almost nobody will see it just due to the volume of new articles.

Yeah, Reddit is a good idea, thanks. Something I haven't utilized yet

Do you name your blog posts in a way that people searching for what you wrote about can find it?

I get 5k views on my articles each week just from search traffic.

I used to name my blog posts meticulously and provide detailed metadata with attention to (good, honest) SEO. The problem is that, while many of us here might use DDG, for the vast majority of people search = Google. And Google has changed its search results to outright hide a lot of standalone personal blogs, even if you search for the exact terms that are used in the blog entries. And there is a lot of content from the first decade of the new millennium that remains just as relevant today, because no one has posted anything more recent at such a length and detail, but Google has simply chosen to deprioritize older content.

How much are your writing?

To me, the thing about getting back into blogging is that it's worked in tight co-operation with taking meticulous process notes as I do something adminny. When I'm programming, my product is the program, and all the writing and documentation therein, so I don't feel the temptation to write or take as many notes.

But when working on adminny tasks? I have to take meticulous process notes so that I can reproduce my work, because the product is a working system without self-documentation as to how I got it working.

That naturally leads to a blog post, because I have a linear document of my work - what worked, what didn't, the hows and whys of my decisions, etc.

I recently argued [0] why this is a great thing in academia especially. Getting cutting-edge information out of papers alone is extremely difficult. Asking experts is ideal, but not everybody can do that. Lecture notes, blog posts, StackExchange answers, and the like all fill a critical intermediate role.

0: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/148261/do-you-k...

I have a blog but it's been a struggle to create new entries since I realized that my writing - at least in English - is not amazing - to put it mildly.

I was made aware of that by my friend who studied English for years and also dated a translator (some "expanding brain" meme potential over here), who agreed to correct one of my posts - and correct he did.

I have a lot to say, but just not enough time to write it down and publish.

So yeah, this will definitely land in my CV, but I don't expect it to be useful for anything else anytime soon.

Your English is great if this post is anything to go by. Also, I think people are quite forgiving of language mistakes if the content is interesting. Don't let your self-consciousness get in the way of sharing cool stuff!

> Also, I think people are quite forgiving of language mistakes if the content is interesting.

True, but working with English native speakers I noticed that the level of engagement I can get from them depends not only on whether my writing is correct, but also on its style. The same applies to non-native speakers, but to a lesser extent.

Anyway style is something I know I need to work on if I'm to wow someone else than a HR person from a local IT company.

I regularly read blog posts written people who are clearly not native English speakers, and often they choose to not even use English at all (in which case I use a translation service). If you content is useful to me, I am perfectly willing to jump through hoops to get at it. I am much more forgiving of language mistakes than perfectly-written English blogspam.

Have you gotten the same kind of feedback on writing your native language?

It may be that some of the tips you were getting, are just good communication advice, and not specific to just English.

In other words, getting lots of corrections is a very good thing! It's probably the fastest way to become a much better writer in any language!

I read this and some of your other posts. As a native English speaker who's read many technical papers, I think your English is totally fine, full stop. Moreover, it's far from being any kind of barrier for technical writing, where the fine points of sentence construction, grammar, flow, etc. are much less important than a clear exposition of ideas.

Have you considered publishing posts in both English and your native language? Since the software dev world tends to be rather English-centric, it could be a breath of fresh air for peers who share your language to be able to read posts not in English.

But your English seems perfect. What is your blog?

Thanks, that's always nice to hear. Anyway, here goes:

https://wringing.it/

The styling (or lack thereof) is like that on purpose. Like I said I wasn't expecting anyone except for a few friends to see it before I had a decent amount of posts.

I wouldn't give two more seconds of thought to your English writing skills—most of my native English speaking friends can't write this well! I would never have been able to tell that it's not your native language.

An idea I came across from some thread HN is to try to write a short TIL blogpost everyday, it might be small trivial thing, bit surely we learn something new on most days.

I started blogging recently as a way to get things I find interesting written down somewhere, like how we process "goodbyes" as people and why they're a good thing. Mostly me just venting things I think are interesting.

I also started journaling recently (which I keep private) and it is a great way to vent, especially while in quarantine. It also help me clarify problems to myself by writing them down. It will also be pretty cool to be able to do a grep on my journal and be able to find my thoughts on the day of an actual event in the future.

All in all, I think it's great to write, and I think it's something that more people should try.

I've personally had the feeling for a long time that most of the things I write don't feel very worthy of entire blog posts. That meant that I just didn't write anything. However, writing stuff up is a really great way to actually absorb what you read / study.

So I decided to start taking public notes: https://paramsingh.github.io/notes/

I don't hold my notes to the high standard of a blog so they can be works in progress or just random things.

Thank you for posting this, I often have a bunch of scambled thoughts for outlines of posts or notes that I'd taking each week that never end up being fleshd out into longer posts no matter what I do. Maybe I should start doing more like this and just clean them up and post them as they currently exist.

I came across https://write.as and it seems great. In fact I use it to share one-off texts with few of my close friends. But there's no commenting and I don't want to use Disqus.

Is there any simpler workflow to use this - without Jekyll I mean?

An interesting alternative to Disqus might be Commento. https://gitlab.com/commento/commento

It's a SaaS or self-hosted commenting application written in Go. I also set this up myself last week https://pieterhollander.nl/post/commento .

Can you describe your workflow for this?

It's just basically me taking notes on the book that I'm currently reading (consciously limited this to 1 book at a time). I underline interesting things while I'm reading and then try to write up notes every weekend. This basically means that I go through the things I read again (some sort of spaced repetition), but this time I know what the interesting parts of it are already. Then it's just a case of going through them randomly some times over the week for more spaced repetition.

The implementation is just a bunch of markdown files in jekyll. (https://github.com/paramsingh/paramsingh.github.io)

The points he makes are great, but rather than self-aggrandizement (not to say all CV building is that,) I have become voracious about knowledge and the "right way to do things," like voting, public policy, guaranteed income, governance, philosophy, and I started a newsletter a few days ago [1] if anyone is interested.

I have used twitter in the past to post a contentious opinion and see what logical debates result. Most people shoot from the hip and are emotional, but some people are quite rational and are willing to look at the data and really understand things. So when looking for consensus, why not make an outlandish statement and be proven wrong? It's very helpful provided you don't take any hits personally.

I find that writing and blogging help me decouple my identity from my ideas, and evaluate them on their merits more objectively.

[1] https://satisologie.com

I don't think you're ever going to hit on the "right way to do" the complicated things you've mentioned. However, there's nothing wrong with having discussions about it.

A good example is voting, because there is a lot of science behind it now. If you look at different voting systems and the amount of "Bayesian Regret" in each system, it's clear that Score Voting is the best system. Things like this I was astonished to discover, because there can be decades between discovery and consensus.

I'm working on launching an online "journal" of sorts, focused on publishing short essays from people who don't ever publish if only because they don't have editorial support or a place for their writing to live. It would also serve as a writers group, a way to support and encourage people looking to improve their writing.

Topics: The aim is to hone in on commentary about books, reading, writing, and broadly speaking, thinking and self-knowledge. I also want to publish stuff that is more exploratory and suggestive than conclusive. Maybe each essay ends with questions? Less tech, more humanities. No ads on the site, can publish anonymously, simple design, good typography, all text. No frameworks or scripts or portals, just the basics needed for a great reading experience.

I don't know. Something like that. If this sounds interesting to anyone, would love to chat.

hi, just wanted to send this over to you to have a look. i haven't used the site myself but came across it recently and it might be related to what you'd like to build. www.wattpad.com

Tangentially related. I've been thinking to create content online. There are a few things I want to share about, and will think of two media of doing it, notably blog posts and videos (mostly on youtube). I don't think I want to engage in twitter/facebook/social media etc.

I see that all these people are using their real name persona on the internet. In this day and age, I think I need to carefully think about anonymity (maybe I also want to write about anonymity, blockchain, security etc, it will be an irony if I don't practice what I preach).

Now my actual question, what is the right balance? How do we create content while at the same time being anonymous. I think this is even harder on video. If there's any resource that can point me out here I'd appreciate it.

The approach I've seen controversial creators I respect take is to make it difficult to doxx them. So full pseudonym and deniable email address, when showing it to people you know personally, tell them you'd prefer it not get linked to you. Most do become known by their real names eventually, but by then the brand has enough fans that it's not a bad thing.

A lot of the more popular blogs seem to be about giving advice to the audience. "10 Reasons to do X." "Why You Should Y in Z." And so on. It always made me think that I would have to do the same to draw attention. But the blogs that I really enjoyed reading were technical dives or even what someone's day-to-day life is like. Blogs like Rachel by the Bay really hit this mark for me.

I haven't blogged much myself at all, but I did write about an SVG bug in Internet Explorer years ago that got a decent amount of attention on StackOverflow. That was pretty cool.

Similarly, this can apply to other media, like making games or YouTube videos. OP's advice could be creatively applied to those as well.

Blogging about something useful is extremely difficult. If you:

• A lot of research goes into a new topic, most people paste • Writing useful examples without errors and confusing extras take forever • Making the text concise also takes forever

This is why I write rarely. PS - this guy serves as a prime example of someone who comes up in my search results a lot and never ends up being useful: https://www.bennadel.com/blog/2782-route-resolution-using-fa...

> I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.

-- Blaise Pascal (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/)

One of my favorite quotes. Apparently they can't find the correct attribution to it, like most good quotes. I first heard it quoted from Mark Twain (/Sam Clemens).

I've started writing down things I learn, notice, or think about. My memory of those things and related things has started to improve since.

Anecdotal, perhaps, but interesting.

I'm a huge fan of writing, especially as a form of technical marketing (or just personal branding). For my last startup, we tried paying a marketing firm to post articles and the results were terrible. Instead, I took a few hours each week and wrote very detailed (timely) articles about our backend technologies, use of different infrastructure products, etc. Those posts got 50-100x more views and a lot more interested customers.

I'm approaching 300 blog posts (closer to 400 if you count drafts). One thing I learned over the years is to reduce as much friction as possible to write your posts.

Also, be careful about scheduling posts. Once you do that, everything changes from a "pure" thing to something with a potential ulterior motive. So just understand what you're getting into there.

A big list of blogs:

gopher://sdf.org/1/phlogs

Gopher only, I know, but those have high quality for sure :D.

You won't see a lot of bullshit like Agile and VooDoo management magic in order how to get your shit done, just real life stories, minimal tools and great new and legacy software, and a different experience altogether.

I like the table of contents at the beginning with the links. I'm going to steal that for my next blog post. The author is a really clear writer, and I love the table of contents because you can jump around and things are bite-sized.

One tip that helped me a lot was to forget about the audience - write for yourself. Use blogging as a tool to flush out your thoughts, and truly understand something. Once that concept clicked, writing once a week has been a blast!

I've been slowly building up the tech I need to create a low friction publishing process (Static site fed by CI/CD type deal).

So yeah definitely planning on blogging more

I am thinking on writing notes/journal. But, I have to draw things which I am not really good at. Does anyone knows about quick drawing solutions?

What kind of drawings? If you're just looking for diagrams, https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid is good.

Simple hand made drawings. Like a block of array, arrows here and there, graphs and stuff.

TikZ would let you do all that fairly easily with code. Helps if you know Latex. You'll find a bunch of tutorials and references online (e.g. [1]), but I think the best source of information is the manual [2], which has tutorial chapters, and StackExchange. TeXStudio is the best editor for it I know of, and installing TeXLive will get you every relevant package (and more - deselect some on installation).

[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/PGF/TikZ

[2] https://pgf-tikz.github.io/pgf/pgfmanual.pdf

I thank Seth Godin for his advice on writing.

Blogging has become a daily ritual in my life for sometime.

wake up > make coffee > write a post.

Not every writer can be a big blogger. For example, there is only one Scot Allexander. If you want to do it as a hobby, it's very good as well.

" I write for myself, first."

I love this sentence as well! When I first start out, I write as a mean to add coherence into my thought process when I am learning something new. Over time, it is also important to learn how to organize this information that may provide meaningful insights for my readers. This allows me to 'digest' my newly acquired knowledge and apply them in my thought process! Here's my blog that I hope to share with all you readers (:

https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/

I started writing about design patterns as well, and wish to hear from you all on what are your thoughts on this topic as well. Do leave a comment in my blog page! (:

https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-03-3-more-cloud-de...

Another my work is my hobby cat

Kind of, but you don't necessarily have to blog about work-related hobbies. You can blog on other interests!

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