Blog about what you've struggled with | Hacker News Reader

Blog about what you've struggled with

jvns.ca

202 pointsyesenadam45 comments

Pretty much what I do, and I find it works quite well, mostly for three reasons

1) I actually give a damn about what I’m writing about, since I had to scrape the brains off of my skull for at least a few hours to figure it out and implement it.

2) I know what to write, since I just went through it, know why I did, and what it’s value was (for me, at least).

3) Since it took me so long, the answer probably isn’t available, or at least easy to find, online, so others are more likely to benefit from it.

2 is why new people should write blog posts too!

Ancient greybeards went through what you went through so long ago they've forgotten it. New perspective is valuable

e: of course don't rely on it for income. As soon as your post becomes popular the spam blogs rewrite it and outcompete you on SEO. Got a couple months rent out of Windows 8 wifi randomly disconnecting :)

And it's such a good way to document for your future self too!

Hmm this code looks stupid, why did I write it... *checks old post from the archive* Oh right that's why..

3 is why I write most of my blog posts

While this is great advice, I've rarely found sharing technical struggles to be interesting (most of it is utterly mundane and full of irritating details rather than interesting challenges). On the other hand, i've found sharing personal experiences of struggle rewarding both for the processing it required of me and because it helped other people to the point I got emails about it. By that I mean stuff like "How the Year of COVID Broke Me, and How I Started Getting Better " , "Lessons Learned the Hard Way in Grad School (so far)". Granted, such self disclosure requires vulnerability, but for me that makes it more meaningful and impactful.

I blog for a living and can only say it's true.

When I review a new technology for an article, it's the ugly places that make good content.

Often things are easy, because the docs of new tech are just horrible.

But I'd even go a step further. When you build a product, look at the things that are hard or solved in an insufficient matter. That's where you get your USPs.

Similar but different vein, a bunch of friends have started "TIL" (today-i-learned) micro-blogs, with a one or two sentences each day of something they learned, found out about. Most are a mix of technical & real world things. For many, it's just a single markdown file they check in to github.

It's a fascinating & interesting ultra-short thing to share! I love it a lot, really interesting connection to folks, to keep tabs on where-abouts they are, what they are up to, while not requiring long posts.

Huh I kinda like this idea of writing a small TIL each day. Feels like it could help get going with the writing and if, at a later date, you're looking for inspiration for a new post you could always expand on a previous TIL and write a longer post about it.

I really agree with this advice, with the added thought that very very specific struggles are usually easier to write about and more compelling to read. For example, this post that my co-author wrote was well-received, I think in part because the advice is so specific ("Don't joke about firing people" as opposed to something like "be a more empathetic manager"). https://staysaasy.com/engineering/2020/06/09/Don't-Joke.html

I also find these types of posts more compelling when the struggle or the solution is non-obvious.

Quite similar to my reasons for blogging:

- To know what I think. Formulating or explaining something in writing makes me think it through really carefully.

- Sharing. Sometimes there are ways of working I think are really helpful, but maybe not so well known.

- Venting. From time to time there are things that annoy me, or ways of working that I don’t like. Then I can write a blog post and argue how things should be instead.

- To learn. In general, I like to discus my posts in the comments and in forums. The only exception is when people resort to insults instead of discussing the merits of the ideas (happens occasionally). But if there is a healthy discussion I usually learn something new.

- To remember. When I read a book on programming or take a MOOC course, I usually write a review of it. Knowing that I will write a review makes me learn the material much better .

- Archive. My blog has also become a nice archive that I can refer to.

- Visibility. Having a blog helps your identity on the web.

- Thrill of having readers. Something I didn’t expect when I started blogging was the thrill of having people reading (and liking) what I write.

More details here: https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-pr...

Every time I want to blog there’s lots of pictures, and it’s a pain to get then into a blog Post. In WordPress it takes forever to upload and fix them (and its generally cumbersome). I figured a static site generator could be nice, but you can’t paste images into a markdown file - creating separate image files and linking them in its even more cumbersome, even if the rest of the writing process is easier.

Sometimes the barrier to blogging is the technology. Ugh.

You might like Typora, which will handle image pasting for you. Some other software to look up: Foambubble, Obsidian, Dendron, Neuron Zettelkasten

This looks really good, thanks for the tips!

IME if it's inconvenient to write, you'll never do it. My blog co-author and I do our drafting and editing in Google Docs for that reason. Once you're done writing, you're sufficiently emotionally invested that you can handle the hassle of porting the content to a public site.

We also only add images to posts if it's absolutely necessary. We probably get less engagement than we would if we had high-quality imagery, but we have wayy more engagement than if we didn't write at all.

About a decade ago I made a PHP scrip that would turn a Word XML file (back before docx) into a html file, including image extraction. It would convert the basic styles to appropriate elements etc, and pulled in some template files for sidebar etc. The resulting files (html + images) could then be uploaded as a blog post.

I never got around to actually writing much and so it never saw much use, but I've been thinking about reimplementing this idea lately.

I've been using makesite.py, which is ~200 lines of python, dumping the picture in a pics folder and then hand editing the markdown.

Maybe a few lines of code and template work would let you add a custom template that would automatically add a folder worth of images.

https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite

"Take full control of your static website/blog generation by writing your own simple, lightweight, and magic-free static site generator in Python. That's right! Reinvent the wheel!"

lol

> creating separate image files and linking them in its even more cumbersome

I've been working on making this the less-cumbersome approach for my own Jekyll site: https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD

What would your ideal process look like? Don't you have separate image files from the start??

Sometimes. Occasionally the images are huge and cant be used as is (or still would have to be uploaded and then linked in). Sometimes the images are in some editor (e.g. inkscape), different layers should be turned on and off to get what I want - and exporting then uploading and linking is more cumbersome. Or Images are hand-drawn illustrations done on a tablet that make the way onto the pc as pdf.

Basically, I think the best workflow may be snipping whatever is on screen, then pasting it into the markdown. The Typora software benrbay posted in a sibling comment actually seems to fit the bill very well. Thanks for that!

I take this to the next level and try to find things to struggle with to begin with. It's kinda like going to the gym - you want to do the thing that will kick your ass because that's how you grow.

Writing about your struggles is a fine way to engage with it and be thoughtful about it - but this is the case because struggle and reflection is just fundamentally valuable.

But what if i struggle to blog about what i struggle with? ;)

It is a good plan. Quite often, i'll come across something that wasn't quite documented or posted about yet and it truly is a golden opportunity to blog about something unique that is useful, as well as actually help others that come across the same issue.

It seems like half of my personal journal entries all begin with "I really need to figure out how to do this more often."

Haven't even tried to write one in almost two weeks. Always such a struggle.

It's even worse when I try to make them public blogs, though. Haven't had one of those in many years, yet I've written about 300,000 words in my personal journal over the past 5 years.

I did start work on trying to retroactively rework some as a blog, but that stalled and I never made the site public.

to take your joke in another direction, people should blog about how hard it is to learn to write well! i.e. people's blogs would be much more fun to read if they first learned how to write.

OP author of the article we're reading about here is not a super great writer, but better than most and has actually learned the most important lesson of business presentation: (1) tell'em what you're gonna tell'em, (2) tell'em in more detail, and then (3) tell'em what you've told'em in summary.

you can read the first paragraph of this blog post and know what it's about. If you're interested, read the rest, and if you're not, you haven't wasted your time because you got the point of it.

> author of the article we're reading about here is not a super great writer

I think she is. (A super-great writer.) One of my absolute favourites.

In the end some people enjoy writing and some don’t. Over the years I have learned how to write reasonably well but it’s still a chore for me.

I envy people who enjoy writing and I see a tremendous value in writing but if you don’t enjoy it I don’t think it’s worth to force yourself.

I built a patio this spring and watched probably 50 youtube videos about various subtasks.

Experts make youtube videos. And this is great because I want to hear from them. But I also really wish I heard more from regular schmucks like me. Not just to get layperson advice but to see that indeed it's not that special a task. "If this guy can do it I sure can."

I like more tech blogs like that. "Some Noob's Guide to a simple but functional compiler in Rust"

Regular folk make terrible videos (no planning, holding a phone in one hand doing the thing with the other producing a shaky video of someone struggling with a two-hand job, etc..)

This will produce high bounce rates, and YT buries the content never to be recommended again.

Yeah, it's hard enough to do the thing, let alone create a great video about it! I recently put sealant in the bathroom around the shower, etc, and it looked easy on the (pro) videos I saw, but it was a pain to do. I'm sure seeing me struggle might be of value to someone, but who wants to watch an idiot do something slowly and badly on a shakey camera?

I 100% do. Seriously. I don't need anything fancy or well edited. I just need ten minutes of you explaining whay you discovered to be the hard parts and what you learned.

You got me really excited when you said "the experts made it look easy but I discovered that..." Keep going. I want to hear more.

That's the videos I want.

True. Maybe professionals need to manage building series like this utilizing amateurs.

That was how I finally started my programming blog. I was struggling to find the root cause of an issue reported on one of my GitHub repos. Luckily I was able to remember something I had read and used it to understand why it was failing. Then I wrote a quick post about it. Since then I’ve only really created one other post about my struggles. Hope to be more active in noting down such posts from now on.

I once had another founder of a tech startup send me a FB message saying it was "unhealthy" to do this. That person is now a VC (:

This resonates with me. I recently tried to create demo videos for https://nocommandline.com . I had assumed it was a simple enough task (I've seen multiple websites with demo videos, I've created demo videos with Adobe Captivate at my 9-5 job) but in the absence of an expensive Adobe Captivate License, it turned out to be much more difficult and time consuming than I expected. The thought I immediately had was - there are probably lots of other SMBs struggling with this; you should blog about this and what finally worked for you.

The thought of blogging about what I struggled with is usually followed by - but you're not an expert in this domain; maybe your solution is actually wrong which means you'll be leading others down the wrong path or maybe it was a hack. I usually counter that thought by making sure that a blog post would clearly show that I'm not an expert in that domain and that I'm simply documenting my experience (sometimes, you're just looking for a hack to get you over a hump so you can ship and then you can come back later and build a more robust solution)

You should not have imposters syndrome if you're replacing the gcloud command. That command makes developers go crazy. For the longest time it was not possible to use micro instances because each time the gcloud apt package upgraded it would need so much resources just to install the package that it'd crash the entire vm. Last time I checked, it needed 60,000 system calls just to list a folder. Most of its invocations can be replaced with clever bash one-liners that curl the json api and metadata.google.internal. So I hope Google is paying attention because their user-facing command line tools are so bad that someone founded a business to be its complete antithesis. So maybe they should have someone take a break on squeezing the last 99.9%ile of latency out of bigtable and build a working command line interface.

To add to your list of ways to write off imposter syndrome —- making the hack or wrong solution public can flush out the real experts who might otherwise not bother.

Almost every time I search for some technical information, all I find are blogs with incorrect information written by people who don't really know what they are talking about.

Almost every time I search for the answer to a question, all I find are SO/forum/reddit posts by people who clearly have no idea what is going on, but think they do.

The whole web sometimes feel like a giant pile of ignorance, created by people looking for prestige, jobs or just ad money.

So, if I am not an expert in a domain (i.e., amongst the very best), and cannot be certain that what I believe to be true is actually true, why should I blog at all? Why add to the ignorance manure?

I wish this cult of self-expression will die down already. I wish people start listening and thinking, instead of just waiting for their chance to talk.

Every wrong thing posted to the internet increases the chance of the right thing being posted later. You can't invent a lightbulb without the 10,000 failed attempts that came before it. The noise is here to stay. Nobody promised that exploring the edges of human thought would be a clean process. It is very messy and people should be afforded the opportunity to be messy.

One of the explicit goals of Stack Overflow when it was founded was literally to fight this phenomenon: The preponderance of wrong/outdated information on the Internet. To a large extent, it has succeeded. Even if the chosen correct answer is no longer correct, there usually is a comment/answer further down pointing out what now works.

So while creating noise is necessary, there is value to curation.

Totally agree and being messy is a feature and not a bug. And if you’re messy enough you might annoy someone enough that they’ll actually put you on the right path.

I haven’t found this to be as extreme as you say in my experience. More often, the things I find on blogs and Stackoverflow are just not the exact issue I’m facing rather than flat out incorrect.

I think I see where you're coming from. I was recently thinking of starting up a technical blog as a form of self-promotion and to have something to show to potential employers. But I also wanted to do something that I felt was good and worthwhile to readers. So I thought about the sorts of programming blogs I'd read in the past that I could maybe emulate or use as a standard. And then it occurred to me that, for the most part, they're either a waste of time, not terribly interesting, or even harmful. I've had better luck with reading textbooks, though maybe I just prefer to try and learn a subject in some depth. But when what you're really selling is your knowledge and expertise, I can see why people do it.

I think if you have the right motivation it's fine. To be blunt I don't think self promotion and hirability is the right one heh I think that will lead to low quality content.

I'm not really a blogger, but I have written and posted stuff I found hard or interesting, like documentation for my self. I reffer to it occasionally too. Idk if any readers got anything out of it. People seemed to like it. I did find that worthwhile though.

If you want to do better, don't shy away from showing times you were wrong.

It's hard to present a universally right answer in tech (or in general), it's not hard to know when you chose wrong answer, and going over it can teach others how to identify the right one and show that you're capable of growth

> Almost every time I search for some technical information, all I find are blogs with incorrect information

Years ago I purchased a laptop with two SSD hard drives RAID'd together at the factory. Of course, it came with Windows; I wanted un-RAID'd SSD hard drives and to install a flavor of Linux on the Primary. Some flavoring to the problem was that [IIRC] at the time there was a BIOS vs UEFI "Linux situation" with this type of setup, which this laptop was in the middle of.

So I went searching around for a solution. I ended up quilting together a solution from three different forum//blog posts and tested it out. I ended up writing myself a working procedure for this quilted solution because for me and this laptop was apparently just a bit different to need all three together in a particular order to work at the time.

Laptop still works [after numerous Linux-flavor OS installations] except for a hardware-level dead right speaker [not sure if my fault or just wear-and-tear over the years].

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