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Comment by aliceryhl | Hacker News Reader

I have spent probably thousands of hours writing random responses helping people on forums, just because its the thing that I do to procrastinate. For example, this year I wrote more than 4000 posts on https://users.rust-lang.org/ and 19000 messages on the help channels in a few Discord servers. I'm probably the world expert at spotting the mistake in small snippets of Rust code at this point.

I honestly wish I was able to channel this incredible amount of writing into blog posts or a book, but I don't know how. My blog has had one post in the last three years. Writing a blog post just takes energy in a way that writing on forums simply does not.

It's always been this way too. For example, in high school, I spent the time on https://math.stackexchange.com/.

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You could easily write some posts using this:

"Most common errors beginners make in Rust"

You're like the world expert on this.

"What people often get wrong about Rust"

Maybe there are common conceptual issues you spotted?

I'm not sure, but I would also imagine that you explained some things a few times in a more simple language, this could also be a great thing for a blog post. Instead of pointing them to a doc and explaining something about it, point them to your blog post then.

I liked this comment because it felt immediately constructive and a great starting point to think about if nothing else. One of probably many examples of this list-based approach (for a different technical subject) is "50 Android Hacks" by Carlos M. Sessa. Avoiding common errors makes sense but are even more valuable when the warnings are paired with idiomatic alternative patterns.

https://www.manning.com/books/50-android-hacks

Grab all your posts and sort them in some kind of logical grouping and order. Decide which ones are still useful, update those that you can, and create a book out of them. Call the book something like, "1000+ answers to your most asked questions." Once you have that, publish it as an ebook. Don't give it away for free. Price it at $19.99 but have specials every so often maybe for $2.99. From that point on add it to every message that you respond to. Tada, you've become a published author with the cred of a technical book. Believe me when I tell you, you can make a career out of it. Add your contact info. so that you can get some public speaking gigs out of it. Given your past of answering questions as a hobby, you'll be able to update the book every few years. Don't look at the book as the money maker, you'll get relatively little money, but as the tool that will expand your career. At the very least, you can add it to your resume.

High priced consultants do this all the time. You should do it. You've written the material already.

I think you're fighting activation energy.

I'd find a way to make it cheap for you (in time and energy) to iterate such that the one-off content that you're providing can be used as stepping stones to a paragraph, and then a chapter, and then a book.

As an example, I've written thousands (!) of customer support messages, via email, chat, or reddit, to help my PhotoStructure beta users.

I've found that the second or third time I answer a question, either I need to fix the product so the question doesn't show up again, or I transcribe my response onto a new page on photostructure.com. In my case, it's just `hugo new content/faq/post.md` and then I dump the new content into the new page.

It doesn't have to be an elaborate post. Perhaps a bit more nuance or detail than my customer support reply, but not much more than that. Sometimes it's only 1 paragraph.

I've found that these "humble starts" can then be iterated on fairly easily, as inspiration comes to you.

As an example, according to git, I've made 15 commits to <https://photostructure.com/faq/library/>. The first iteration was just a handful of sentences I wrote as a response to what I meant by "library."

Yeah, it's definitely activation energy. Once I've actually started working on something, I can do anything, but damn, starting is tough.

Wow, I can relate to this so much.

What are some techniques anyone here has found to help push oneself to get started on things?

If the first step is too big or the end goal is too far, I cut the first step into smaller steps, and try to find a tempting intermediary goal.

Right now, I'm restoring an old motorcycle, and it's not going well. A bolt broke and I need to extract it from the engine I just reassembled.

My end goal now isn't to ride a shiny vintage bike, it's just to get it running. The first step isn't to extract the broken bolt, it's to open the engine again, a ten minute job.

Start small, set reasonable goals, and be careful about premature optimisation.

Start working on something small and easy that's related to the thing you're actually trying to accomplish, and that'll help swap the broader context into your head that you need to work on the larger problem.

Break the larger problem down into tiny little pieces that are easy to accomplish. Put them in a list. Pick off the easy items first each time you're trying to get started.

That’s really interesting, I’m the opposite where starting on things is easy but pulling through to the end and actually making a finished product is tough. I wonder if there’s a word for that.

Start with a high level outline. Organize. See what that looks like and let me know if you have any questions.

Take the essence of the question asked, or the non-working sample code given, take your response on the forum post, verbatim, and post that on your blog. Your blog is a marketing vehicle, you aren't necessarily doing it to rank high in google or get lots of traffic for ads. You're doing it so you have a single source of content you can direct someone towards and also identify yourself as a source of knowledge and expertise.

It is precisely what I have done in the past.

I'm definitely not putting things on my blog for google rankings or ads. Those sound like they would be really boring to spend my time on, and the ads are extra pointless because the government has put a cap on my income in exchange for being paid to be a student, and I'm already at this cap with my part-time software job.

I will certainly try to see if I can repurpose some of my better responses to common questions as blog posts.

I have various blogs and outlets for putting up my writing. Only one of those has Google ads on it. It has Google ads not for the revenue (I don't think the ad revenue has even generated enough over the years to cover the hosting cost) but it is for me to understand how Google ads work on a Wordpress website. My experience of ads usually comes from "I need to integrate this SDK and provide these reporting tools so that the people who care about ad revenue can stay away from my desk" not a "I am a small-time content provider using Google ads."

At least, that's the story I tell myself to salve my ego due to not making any money from ads on my personal website :-)

As an addendum to posting your content on your own website, whenever someone reaches out to me for help, I always direct them to ask the question on the relevant forum, e.g. Unity3D or Artificial Intelligence or some such place, or post it on Stackoverflow, and then email me a link to the very public location. I have the philosophy that I will cheerfully and willingly labour over a lengthy answer and example code that will help out 10,000 people with the same problem. But I won't give the time of day to a single person.

Focus on Answering The Damn Question. In my experience, this is enough to attract traffic in the long run.

If that works, then you can start thinking about monetization. For now, just build something good amd see how it gets picked up.

So don't do it for ads, but you should do it for ranking. You have a large body of content waiting to be exposed and once it does, if you later decide to write a book or do conferences or do training, then your blog will help you achieve that. You should be rewarded for the effort you have put into helping other people.

As someone just getting started on Rust, I’m grateful for people like you helping the newbies out with our little snippets of code. So thank you, even if we haven’t interacted yet :)

Why don't you write a book called "rust gotchas: 4000 subtle ways rust can try to f*ck up with you and how you can defeat it"?

I'm (almost) serious (if you do that, do several, specific titles: "100 lifetime gotchas", "100 traits gotchas", etc.) I've read several books that were little more than short blog posts collections, with a common theme but no real overall structure, and, mind you, some of them were pretty good despite of that, because they solved real problems I had. Some people learn better with a bottom-up approach (i.e seemingly random sequence of independent items that eventually let you grasp the big picture) than top-down (3 parts, with each part having 3 chapters, with each chapter having 5 sections, with each section having...)

Mood; right now I have 6 published posts on my personal blog (hosted on github) spanning 5+ years, as well as a couple on my old company blog, but honestly there's a big hurdle to go from shitposting on the internet to publishing posts.

I do see blogposts as a stepping stone to writing books though.

Anyway I've written thousands if not tens of comments all over the internet, but I also have massive impostor syndrome so I never really look back to see if said comments were appreciated or educational.

I've also been fairly active on the Go slack channel, but very much from a beginner's mindset. 10+ years of software development and I still feel like I'm feeling my way around in the dark.

I've got tons of material to write about though, I really should set aside a couple hours to put things down. I feel like that would be a possible way forwards.

But at the same time I'm pretty terrified of being called out for being wrong; not only because it's confrontational, but because I would have to amend or retire my posts. Call me weird but it's giving me a lot of anxiety.

But, I should probably just bite the bullet and go for it, it'll be a way to improve my confidence and advance in my career, because that's been stuck for a while.

I should look into blogging platforms that are like Twitter, but for longer posts. But not full length ones. IDK

I coin one rule for blogging: However you do it keep it consistent. If you do monthly long reads keep doing that. If you do short posts 5 times per day keep making them 5 times per day (its better to drop to 4 and make a buffer that auto publishes than to skip days)

Forum discussions can be a mess of excess and ot information. You could easily cut and paste questions you've answered. (Sometimes modify them to fit how generic your answer is) Then copy paste your answer under it as well as useful bits from other peoples response.

Put links to topics and/or profiles with everything you "steal" to promote the forum.

Make tools to automate the process. You don't want to be muleing clip board back and forwards.

Just dump it into a post and save the draft if it isn't finished in 15 seconds.

Again: be consistent at it. If there is one post per day the visitor should be able to visit 1 time per day and find it. If it isn't there for 1-3 days - why bother?

I disagree with this advice. I write articles when there is a need for them. Sometimes they are 2 months apart, and sometimes 2 days. I can't plan the problems I'll face and solve in advance.

I also spend a lot of time updating old articles with new information, and that new information trickles in at random intervals.

Most of your readers will find you through Google, when they're trying to solve a specific problem. They won't subscribe to your content or return without a specific goal in mind, so consistency is not that important.

Could say that is still consistent. If your articles arise out of a need then that is the formula. What you could do is delay the publication if there is no urgency.

I found a really cool blog one time where the author was writing a book spread out over 4 blog posts (or so) that he kept updating. His daily new posts briefly described the updates he made. It was a cool rss subscription for me. I certainly didn't visit his book every day but his updates gave a sense of involvement and I ended up reading the "same" articles multiple times both for the content and to see the progress. Had he just updated the postings I would never have returned.

Just spitballing, but how about just tentatively titling a book "Common Rust Mistakes". Then take those 4000 posts (congratulations and thank you, by the way) and group/fishbone them according to elements that you feel are appropriate. I hazard to guess there's a CMS or LaTeX/DocBook package or org-mode setting that would allow posting first draft notes as blog entries. If you need a forum conversation to focus your writing, imagining a Gentle Reader may help. Many writers also bend the ears of family, friends, and editors.

There’s a decently well selling book on Python that is of the same format.

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

While I love books immensely, these days I just don't buy them any more. What I do is google answers to problems, and for guidance on how to do things. There's just so much fantastic information immediately available... and there's the "constantly changing" thing that many people have mentioned. Books can't really keep up, alas.

So, I'm sorry it's not a paid position, but really, thanks so much for helping the modern programmer, particularly with rust... it's a challenging language.

Having had you reply to multiple questions of mine I just want to so thank you!

> Writing a blog post just takes energy in a way that writing on forums simply does not.

The key here is the interlocutor. Trying to write an interesting post for a general reader is a dauting task hence the energy. Try to materialize that reader a bit more, even if mentally. Or write in dialog form :)

It doesn't have to be interesting if it solves a problem.

I write about health insurance and visas. My guides are not page-turners, but they're a welcome introduction to really complex matters.

There's a model in the way Randall Munro turned a bunch of XKCD comics into the best-selling books "What If" and "How To." It's a little more complicated than gluing together all of your posts, but with the right editor, it can all come together. https://xkcd.com/how-to/

+1 to this. This is really just a compiler/editor problem.

Compiling your answers into semantically sensible standalone posts- that's something that some specific people do very well, very easily, as easily as you respond.

Whether it is economically advantageous for you to hire someone is a different question- answer is probably not- but if you knew someone in the Rust space who was an editor rather than an author, they could, in 2-3 hours a week, scan your posts, distil the useful elements, and write something for you to approve and post. Very common workflow in the publishing space.

Ghostwriters are this at book-scale- interviewing the named author, which, like forum posts spurs answers, which get aggregated into subject areas and distilled using a common voice.

You definitely don't have to beat yourself up about it, or try to solve it with "activation energy" processes- which to be fair sometimes work. Some people are just good at some stuff and other people good at other stuff.

Cheers, good luck.

You don't need to turn it into a book. You can turn it into an online resource.

I help people settle in Berlin. I got tired of repeating myself, so I put my answers on a website and linked to it. Now it's my main source of income, and a well-known resource for expats.

I don't think any topic can be monetized with such ease, but it doesn't hurt to try. Even if you completely fail, you'll still help thousands of people who are googling their problems.

Just take your last 20 responses and turn them into a post?

I agree. Or if you want to invest a bit more effort: surely there are patterns of problems you are seeing, each of which could be a blog post.

This would likely be well suited for a short book of rust anti patterns. I love resources that are learning by inversion: here is what not to do, and why.

It's easy to solve problems that people currently have, it's hard to visualize the problems people might have.

Sounds like you respond more strongly to the social aspects (eg feedback mechanism) of forums.

If you can figure out how to leverage that for channeling into a book or blog posts, that'd probably work.

Maybe the technique mentioned by the OP about "releasing each chapter online as an ebook" would get you some of the way there?

ha, that's funny.

I found i have the same sort of procrastinating behavior. If I want to clean my house, just avoid some higher-priority thing.

You should harness it. Decide you will put in 4 hours a day doing exercise, and procrastinate by writing a book on the couch. :)

I don't know if this will help, but an idea. Take your posts, copy them, and paste them on your blog. Add a little bit of background to make it understandable outside of the context of a message thread.

Still feel like a ton of work?

I created my own blog as a "note to self" type work. I would write down anything I was working on so that I could reproduce it in the future. I now have hundreds of personal documents and hundreds of professional documents at work. They come in amazingly handy, to me, nearly every day.

I've now written a dozen very small books on subjects I care about. The books are just 20 pages or so and people seem to love them. An example is "Publish your eBook by Joel Dare" on Amazon. See also, Zines.

I write down solutions to problems I encountered. It's pretty useful if you encounter the same problems again. I ended up on my own website through Google a few times.

Are you on CodeMentor? Sounds like you should be!

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