You Should Write Blogs (2005) | Hacker News Reader

You Should Write Blogs (2005)

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58 pointsluu18 comments

I want to blog, but I never really am able to come up with topics I think are interesting enough. It's related to the problem Ira Glass points out (http://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginner...), where you don't like what you're creating for a period when you're starting out -- but I don't even really like the ideas I'm having.

The few entries I have on my site are things I don't think are especially interesting, but I had reasons to share them outside of "hey, a blog post", so I wrote them.

This is closely related to the problem of coming up with ideas for a startup. But none of that advice has really helped me. For example, "what should my software do" is restated as "find a problem". Similarly, pg says "An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question." But I don't really come up with questions that seem approachable.^1

So I don't write. Any suggestions for getting over the hump and finding things to write about?

[1] Actually starting things is something I think is incredibly undervalued in society, especially for children. Growing up, I didn't even enter my mind that I could create things. I read a lot, but never wrote. Throwing off this blanket is an extremely hard process I've just started doing.

There must be something in life that really floats your boat. Blog about that. If that something is new to you, then blog about your experiences. My blog is usually a way for me to record experiences [1], ideas, techniques and even resources [2] I find useful. I don't rate my writing skills that highly but do reference posts heavily in my resume, which gets positive results. It amazes me how quickly I built mine up. And it doesn't get read. Even today, two years after I wrote it, my experience activating a phone is the most popular post [3] (it's the only post that gets more than 10 hits a month - every other post that even gets a hit gets no more than one).

[1] http://bit.ly/1tgHUcD

[2] http://bit.ly/1tNqWmF

[3] http://bit.ly/1EmJopn

In closing, the part of my site that gets 1000's of hits a month is just plain text with some crappy design that I threw together in 1998, about off-road driving and vehicle recovery techniques. That's not even part of my blog.

That doesn't seem boring to you? My experiences seem to be among a few lines:

1. "This person said this, and I agree". Note how much my earlier post is this category.

2. Huh, this thing isn't great, or is confusing, but I have no real solutions.

I wouldn't read anything at all like this. Maybe it's something I do need to push through, but it's rough when I don't know what I'm aiming for and don't like what I'm making.

Not boring. In fact quite the opposite. I go back to my posts often, especially when I'm doing something for work (documentation, for example), and need ideas.

I guess if you are a software developer, you can make a blog about hard issues that you want to remember.

I am not sure if this will cause problems with NDAs though.

Read the last paragraph of the linked article again and choose that person to be yourself.

Or you could also simply choose your grandmother and decide "I wanna explain the stuff I'm working on in a simple way so that she will understand", never mind if she doesn't have access to the internet or is dead, you can still write it in a way that makes sense to her.

I write my blog for me. How I finally understood a problem I've had trouble with, or sometimes I just post a funny quote from a book I've been reading.

I'd love to write and have people read my ramblings: But putting things in the public record is my #1 concern. No-one knows what kind of 1984/'your past is all you are' backlash you might expect in the future.

I see ways for my future health insurance provider to investigate my blogging for risk-taking overtones. They might even do it automatically.. The tendency for people to agree with "people who smoke should pay more for health insurance" is also scary. What's next?

Anyway.. Blogging behind a pseudonym is also not really an option. I could be tracked down eventually. Even Satoshi will be outed, and he's a cryptographic genius. Also, I might lapse and let my 'nuanced opinions' go wild by accident only to be more at risk after discovery. Just look at those Youtube commenters go..

If you let fear stop you from doing something as benign as blogging, I think you need to re-evaluate your risk vs. reward assessments.

Your argument could be just as easily applied to this comment on Hacker News.

people who smoke should pay more for health insurance

If the risk is priced properly, it shouldn't be that scary for other big life choices to be priced in. Health insurance for smokers is a lot more expensive, yes, but that isn't just a whim. Tobacco use costs us a lot as a nation[1] and most citizens are not thrilled to subsidize other people's choice to smoke, especially given everyone (smokers included) knows it is very bad for you.

We are OK with people who have big houses and speeding tickets, being required to pay more for home & auto insurance. Both are choices- like smoking.

Insurance is about risk pooling; grouping people in pools of equal risk is the core idea of insurance. In fact when you group people at high risk in with people at low risk, that becomes a subsidy.

[1]: http://www.cancer.org/research/infographicgallery/tobacco-re...

I'm trying to reconcile this with the Keith Rabois statement: “I don’t know of a single successful CEO or entrepreneur who blogs regularly.”

http://blog.asmartbear.com/ceo-blogging.html

Steven Sinofsky, Bill Gates? There are many.

Are you the CEO of a large tech company? No? You could be blogging.

The mention of Bill Gates probably wasn't fair, since he wasn't blogging at the time of being CEO. But several people come to mind: Joel Spolsky, Coding Horror. And how about ... Paul Graham and Sam Altman?

Amazon's CTO Werner Vogels blogs pretty regularly at http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/

I started blogging into the void almost exactly seven years ago. No promotion. No trying to be controversial. No plan. What I didn't expect was the effect that reddit, Hacker News, and eventually Twitter would have. They're essentially content discovery services, and I am grateful that all three exist.

I just had an interesting experience interacting with a CTO who writes a blog. (If he is okay with it, I'll post his name later.)

I was between jobs, and I asked myself, "Where do I want to take my career next?" and I decided that I wanted to move in the direction of Big Data and Analytics. I already knew of an analytics company that was doing cutting edge stuff with Kafka and Storm, so I sent the CTO an email (I had briefly met him once before at a Meetup). He said "Yes, let's talk" and we scheduled a talk for 1 week in the future. I had that week mostly free, so I decided to spend that time studying the company. And I was amazed and how much I could learn about the company, because this is pretty much the first company I have ever applied at where the CTO writes long, thoughtful posts on his personal blog.

I have worked at WineSpectator.com and Timeout.com and ShermansTravel.com, and even though all of those are publishing firms, none of them have any public information about their technology (this is changing, slightly, in the case of Timeout.com). With each of those companies, I basically went in blind, with no idea of what they were doing.

In contrast, the analytics company was transparent: they had released some important software to Github, so I was able to review the code, and read the issues that other developers had raised. They had also started a mailist on Google Groups, so I was able to read over dozens of public conversations regarding the strengths and weaknesses of their technology. And the CTO posts 2 or 3 posts each month, to his personal blog, most of the posts being long and in-depth. I read everything he had written during the last year, and so I was able to get a good sense of why he had made the decisions that he had made (why use Kafka and Storm) and where he'd like to evolve the company's technology stack.

Because of all that, I felt like we were able to have a high-quality conversation (via both Skype and email). I didn't need to ask stupid beginner questions like "So, uh, what do you guys do?"

The argument against blogging is similar to the (now largely discredited) argument that used to be made against open-sourcing one's own technology: if you give away the company's secrets, then your company has no unique advantages. I can recall, during the 1990s, people would look at you like you were crazy if you suggested you were going to give away part of your technology. But over the last 20 years, the whole tech industry has become much more comfortable with the idea of open-sourcing some of a company's technology.

Having a public blog is a bit like having a public open-source project: it raises your exposure, and perhaps even facilitates the process whereby others can help you. And the limits of both strategies are the same: I think it is rare for a company to open-source 100% of its technology, and I think it would be rare for a CTO or CEO to share 100% of their thinking on a blog. But sharing part of the technology, or part of one's thinking, can clearly have benefits.

Please add [2005] to the title.

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