23 ms·

Engineers Should Blog

172 points by patgenzler 10y ago

exratione 10y ago
I think this misses another equally important reason, which is to do your part to help build the gift economy upon which we all rely in our day to day work. Near every common solution and recipe has been written up by someone, somewhere, and we all make use of these gifts. When you learn to do something useful that other people will likely also have to accomplish at some point in time, write it up. Not only will it benefit people out there in the world, but it is also a great way to ensure that you yourself don't have to reinvent the wheel a few years down the line. Who remembers the details after that long? So write it down, and if you write it down, you may as well publish it.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  While I agree generally with what you've written here, my only issue with it is that writing it up takes about as long as building the thing, and I'm pretty lazy. Also, if someone, somewhere, has written up nearly ever common solution, how do I know which ones are novel enough to put the effort in to publishing. Most of things I build aren't novel or new in any way, I'm fairly sure.
  - wazanator 10y ago
    You will know what to write. When you spend time searching for an answer to an odd problem but don't find it and have to do it yourself you will want to write about it afterwards because you will want others to know you figured out the solution.
- mooreds 10y ago
  > do your part to help build the gift economy upon which we all rely in our day to day work Great point, but I think most folks aren't going to be persuaded. I asked a tech meetup how many folks had read from stackoverflow the past month. 95% of hands went up. Then I asked how many folks had answered a question. Far fewer, maybe 10%. And I think I was the only person who had asked a question on the site. The 90/9/1 rule is real. But I agree, we should encourage folks to join the 1% of content creators.
xiphias 10y ago
When I read ,,the only thing you need is an editor'', I thought how cool it would be if what I write would be reviewed by some people before going public...it would make me less shy about it. Then I realized he means a text editor (though he's an editor himself)
- PretzelFisch 10y ago
  That's my biggest problem, how do you improve your written communication without an editor? You can do the same thing over and over and call it practice, but without a reviewer how will you magically improve this skill?
  - solipsism 10y ago
    Same way you acquire any other service. Pay for it, or know somebody.
  - graeme 10y ago
    1. Post stuff for people to view. Pay attention to what is popular, and what isn't 2. Read stuff aloud before posting 3. Read widely, and pay attention to writing you like. I've built a business off of writing: https://lsathacks.com/explaantions/ https://lsathacks.com/explaantions/ I got started by writing a travel blog during a yearlong trip. I posted each entry to Facebook. When an entry got a lot of comments/views, I could tell it was better. I also got confidence that I was writing well. As I kept writing, I always made sure to show my work. And I found that reading aloud helped me find awkwards parts. Finally, I got started during a time when I was reading lots of blogs and novels. Good reading will help your writing. That's about it. Practice, tempered by feedback and observing the work of others.
    - kedean 10y ago
      The problem doing that with technical writing is that your audience isn't going to be judging you on your writing skills, they'll be judging you on the technical content. OP isn't worried about their technical content, they're worried about their writing skills. The technical audience is going to be affected by writing skills (it'll affect how well points are made, etc), but they aren't going to give feedback on that part. "Just ship it" doesn't work with soft skills.
tomjen3 10y ago
Thanks to Beeminder I stuck to blogging for a while (my results, such as they are, can be found on my website) even though I wasn't happy, and they are all full of horrible grammar. The only thing I learned from the project is that I really don't like blogging, I want to build stuff.
- srcreigh 10y ago
  What's the link to your blog?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
JCDenton2052 10y ago
No, every engineer should not blog. It is hard enough to find the right information when you have to shift through clickbait and the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal. If I was interested in assessing someone's caliber, I'd rather look at their Github than their blog. Anyone can write a blog post, not everyone can write good code. Blog if you have some insight into technology that hasn't been already elucidated or if you disagree with what's out there. Having said that, I plan to start my own blog at some point. What will I be writing about? I'll start with reviews of technical books. Why? Because I have read a couple since the beginning of the year that I was unhappy with and had to return, but bought them in the first place because other people said good things about them. Hopefully if someone in the future considers them they will come across my view and take it into consideration.
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  I don't particularly want everyone publishing code, really. "not everyone can write good code" Not everyone can tell what's good, what's not, and why. And searching through 20x the amount of code now to find something that a) works, b) is documented, c) is kept up to date (and is also accurate/correct) - just gets harder the more 'stuff' gets published.
- srcreigh 10y ago
  Tim didn't say it's useful for other engineers. He said it's useful 1) to get non-technical people can hear about your skills (the ones who couldn't tell good code from bad code) and 2) for yourself, since writing forces clear thinking.
- nur0n 10y ago
  Code and blog posts are just two ways of crystallizing ideas. In the same way that not everyone can write good code, not everyone can translate ideas clearly into blog format.
- noobermin 10y ago
  Another thing this turn hurts is this another avenue the "pretty people"[0] can use to get a foot in the door with little to no actual technical experience. I am reminded by a blogpost that got to the front page a few weeks ago about the "new Google OS" that was going to replace everything...written by an admitted non-coder/technical person. Many hackers are great at what they do, actually producing working, sensible products, but aren't bloggers. Sure, if you can do both, all the more power to you. People who can't blog (out of desire or time or just because they don't like writing may be) shouldn't be seen as any less a hacker because they don't. The best way to gauge a person's ability is their work, which github, et. al. is supposed to provide. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/28/beware-the-pretty-people/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/28/beware-the-pretty-people/
lossolo 10y ago
You should certainly blog if you did something different, something that is innovative, if you solved an interesting problem. But.. lets be honest, political correctness aside. Most software engineers have nothing to blog about, they just glue some libraries and make couple of db requests and that's about all they do. Nothing what they do is innovative or worth blogging about. Not every engineer should blog or we would see tens of thousands of new links everyday on HN that would point to another blog that writes about how someone wrote an api and did 3 mysql requests - That's called spam. We already have thousands of resources/articles/blog posts that solved those problems and unless you are bringing something new to the table, what you wrote was already written.
- noobiemcfoob 10y ago
  The specific problems encountered and methods that proved to be a workable solution for an engineer when gluing any set of arbitrary modules is practically guaranteed to be unique information, though mired in a ton other, more mundane information. It'll be the mark of a good writer to properly cut the content from the fat. But this isn't about being a good writer. It's about improving your own understanding and simply widening our dataset of known engineering practices.
- katpas 10y ago
  Sometimes gluing together libraries in a certain way can produce an error or behaviour that's not documented (as it's outside the scope of each individual project) as either nobody has tried to do that before or they've not written about it. Multiple times now it's been an obscure blog post found on google that's given the answer to those issues.
jconway45 10y ago
I stopped reading when you started to suggest engineers might work on Elance and the like..
codr4life 10y ago
I find that blogging helps me untangle messy reasoning, to the point where I often end up improving the code to make it easier to explain. The marketing angle is less interesting to me, I'm not selling anything. What's missing from the article is the bigger perspective; by sharing ideas and knowledge openly, everyone wins. https://github.com/codr4life/vicsydev https://github.com/codr4life/vicsydev
antingate2 10y ago
How about No?
donovanm 10y ago
Yeah I agree with this that most software engineers should consider this. It's another way to set yourself apart from the masses that most people will never put in the time and effort to do. The idea that other people put forward that you should only write about things if you think your ideas are innovative always seemed silly to me. A lot of things we think of as trivial could end up being useful and important information to someone else. Besides how are you supposed to know if what you're saying is 'innovative' before you say it and get feedback on it?
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  > A lot of things we think of as trivial could end up being useful and important information to someone else. This is very true. There have been many, many times when there's a technical article on the top of HN on a topic that I would never have imagined writing about simply because it seemed too basic or "entry-level". There have even been a few topics that I had actually considered writing about but dismissed it, thinking to myself "nah, everybody already knows that".
  - holdenk 10y ago
    Some of the highest traffic blog posts I've written have been on the "entry-level" side of things.
    - mdpopescu 10y ago
      Now that I think about it, one of the pieces of advice I got most comments on was helping an indie writer figure out the intricacies of the "a" HTML tag :) [I left a comment on her blog and a lot of other indie writers thanked me for the details - they needed them when formatting books for Kindle.]
pavfarb 10y ago
Engineers should blog publicly when they have something to say. Something useful for their colleagues. Engineers shouldn't waste time forcing themselves to blog instead of work just to push their career forward: frequently they just expose they don't have anything to say in extremely unreadable way. What a waste of time for everybody. Soft skills helps you grow as an engineer, it's true, but I think it's important to understand that not every exercise should become a public material. But, in a generation publishing their every 2nd gym workout on instagram, who am I kidding anyway.
- srcreigh 10y ago
  Many times you don't know what's useful to your colleagues until you hit publish. Writing is useful as experimentation that way.
  - katpas 10y ago
    Agreed, I tend to take the number of times I'm asked a question in person by someone new as a signal that a topic is worth writing up. It's also easier to sit down and come up with a well thought through answer that you can link out when asked again. Opposed to paraphrasing each time and potentially missing key points/clarity. For example, I wrote this up after meeting lots of clients when I was freelance who were regularly questioning why they couldn't find technical co-founders > https://hackernoon.com/developer-risk-profiles-why-you-wont-find-a-technical-co-founder-514381d9ad09#.2ii4tjj35 https://hackernoon.com/developer-risk-profiles-why-you-wont-...
  - pavfarb 10y ago
    Writing is, publishing and noising the channels isn't. I'm afraid I find experimentation like that at cost of other people's time and attention to be a bit petty crime.
- noobermin 10y ago
  Do you want people who have a happening social media presence over productive and competent people? It rocks to have both, but one should be prioritized over the other. The moment soft-skills are more important than actually being able to deliver is the moment the game becomes politics.
Rapzid 10y ago
What do people view as good blogging platforms for this stuff these days? Jekyll on Github? Something else? I'd like to get going fast focusing on content, but of course want good syntax highlighting, comments, and such features.
- joshvm 10y ago
  Jekyll is pretty great (just chuck a disqus block in your footer), there's a real risk of getting bogged down in setting up the 'perfect' system with it and never getting round to publishing anything. I think Wordpress still has one of the most outstanding install experiences, but keeping it up to date is a pain.
  - Rapzid 10y ago
    Cool, I may give Jekyll another shot(had a false start couple years ago). I have tons of experience doing hardened WP installs(and compromise root cause) but almost no experience USING it haha. I'd prefer not to go down that rabbit hole if something like Jekyll is sufficient.
    - UweSchmidt 10y ago
      If you only publish an blogpost once in a while, you wouldn't even need Jekyll. Figure out your template, and save your post in an .html file, add a link to the index.html and upload both to /var/www/ on your own cheap Linux cloud webspace. Markdown is nice, but if you don't need much you can sprinkle some <h..> and <b> tags on your post and you're done. There are browser based syntax highlighting tools where you can paste in your code from your IDE and get it back nicely formatted with the appropriate CSS. Might not be right for you, but I had to bring up the easiest, the truly minimalist, hey, the original way to it.
  - nvarsj 10y ago
    Indeed, I think I've spent more time tweaking my jekyll based site than actually blogging. It was a lot simpler when I just had some html pages I edited in Emacs :).
- 10y ago
aarongeisler 10y ago
I think there is some truth to this. I landed my first startup engineering position via a blog post. This particular post only took 30 minutes to write - they can be short and sweet.
- srcreigh 10y ago
  This is awesome! Did you expect the post to get you a job? Do you have a link to it?
noobermin 10y ago
May be some hacker should make a NN to produce hipster-hacker blogposts so they don't need to. Just do a couple posts, train on those, and sit back and get both the creds for having a happening medium profile while maintaining your productivity.
0x006A 10y ago
ok then, lets turn this around: every blogger should code!
- greglindahl 10y ago
  Most jobs have "good communication skills" as a prereq. Compare with the fraction of jobs that require coding.
Chyzwar 10y ago
Blogging is waste of time. Most of blogs are paid PR/Marketing/SEO content that is low quality click-bait. Like this blog post that is PR piece for company that author works. Engineer should sharpen theirs skills on github. During interview github profile is much larger hiring factor than blog.
- zzzcpan 10y ago
  > Blogging is waste of time. It certainly is a waste of time for improving your engineering skills, it's a myth. But it isn't for PR, which is very important these days even to get somewhere in software engineering, not to mention for pushing any kind of product or attracting other engineers to hire.
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    ... being able to explain things concisely and accurately is a skill that helps any engineer.
  - Chyzwar 10y ago
    You are either Engineer or not. Writing blog post will have less of effect on your engineering skills than writing code.
    - zzzcpan 10y ago
      But it doesn't matter how great of an engineer you are if nobody knows about you.
    - saryant 10y ago
      I was able to step up to a major tech company because they noticed my blog posts, Stack Overflow answers and conference talks. That nearly doubled my income.
jlgaddis 10y ago
I maintained a blog for a few years (mostly while preparing to take the Cisco CCNP exams) but I haven't wrote regularly for going on five years. It was extremely beneficial to me in several ways. I ran into an issue with some HP ProCurve switches that HP basically said "yeah, that can't happen". It was only after writing it up -- along with a video -- and someone from HP reading it that they reached back out to me, flew an engineer out to "witness" it firsthand, and fix it. Later, they flew me out to Roseville for a few days to hang out with some of their engineers. Later, they invited me (and paid all my expenses) to attend an HP Tech Day as well as Interop NYC. In addition, I was invited to attend several Net Field Day [0] events where I got to hang out with some very smart people in the networking industry in Silicon Valley. Stephen Foskett, the guy behind NFD, knew about me from my blog. Also, while I was at one of the NFD events, I got an e-mail from someone who "knew me" from my blog. An ISP in my area needed a new Network Engineer to replace their main guy who had just left. They were about to start doing some new things and needed someone with lots of experience with OSPF and BGP in particular. After I returned, I met the owners to chat over breakfast one morning. I've been working there a little over five years now. I've done a handful of small "side jobs" as well, mostly for smaller companies whose IT guys found me via a Google search and reached out to me for assistance. Last, it's certainly not making me rich but (even though I really haven't written much in the last five years) the ads that appear on my blog (and Youtube videos) still earn enough so that Google has to send me a 1099 every year. Beer money. :-) ETA: I actually wrote up a similar post, "Why You Should Be Blogging" [1] in 2011. It was kinda sorta aimed at others studying for Cisco exams but I think it's probably general enough to apply to the HN crowd as well (I haven't re-read it recently, TBH). [0]: http://techfieldday.com/ http://techfieldday.com/ [1]: http://evilrouters.net/2011/10/20/why-you-should-be-blogging/ http://evilrouters.net/2011/10/20/why-you-should-be-blogging...
Buge 10y ago
>Recruiting systems are optimized to filter out false negatives (i.e eliminate people that don’t satisfy their bias) at the expense of false positives (i.e miss out on good people). I thought the definitions of false negative and false positive were the opposite.
- mrlase 10y ago
  It is the opposite. False positive in this context would be thinking someone is good when they're actually bad and vice versa for false negative...
- rev_bird 10y ago
  Yeah, I had trouble parsing that sentence, but I agree. Recruiting systems usually encourage false negatives.
lithos 10y ago
READ: I target engineers with email advertising/recruiting, and want you to make my job easier.
bloaf 10y ago
I'm surprised he didn't encounter the 4th reason for not blogging: 4. The topics I want to blog about are controversial. That is, strong but controversial opinions on certain technologies are just as likely to help you get noticed as hurt you (i.e. get noticed in a negative way.) Even if the topic isn't technically controversial, it can still be a negative. Revealing that you helped {religious minority church} set up their network, or that you solved a problem with {porn website} can also put a mark on you that is not automatically good. Heaven forbid you worked for/supported {political organization} this election cycle. So the answer is, of course, to self-censor. You have to strip out your opinion and context and only blog about technical details that you are very confident are correct. Keep your jokes gender neutral and your insights limited to your profession. But that's boring. That's not blogging, it's writing a corporate memo. We've just ratcheted up the difficulty, limited the new thoughts you're allowed to think, and made you invisible to all hiring managers who can't recognize when your technical manuscript applies to their industry.
- mooreds 10y ago
  I don't know if this is strictly true. I don't deny that blogging about controversial subjects will turn off possible employers or close doors. That is definitely something to be aware of. But you could look at the flip side of that and say that this is actually filtering out opportunities wouldn't be a fit. Much like qualifying leads in sales is something you want to do as quickly and easily as possible, doing the same for employment opportunities can help you focus on organizations where there is a culture fit. With respect to your example, if an employer was offended by your support for a minority group or political candidate, is that an employer you'd feel comfortable bringing your whole self to work at? I may be hopelessly Pollyanna, but I think I'd avoid that type of situation. If you are a software developer and those are the only type of opportunities you have access too, I agree, you should avoid blogging about such controversial topics. Or get good at remote work.
  - bloaf 10y ago
    Strictly speaking, the only way my post can be untrue is if "fear of controversy" was not a reason people avoided blogging, or they feared controversy for an entirely different reason than the one I provided.
mooreds 10y ago
I love blogging. The OP makes some great points about how it exposes you to a different set of people than answers on stackoverflow or HN do. I have been blogging for over a decade and have definitely had some positive experiences, including a co worker finding a post when searching for a solution and an interviewer checking out my blog and mentioning it. I have also had a small bit of work come to me directly because of my blog. (However my blog is pretty unfocused in part because I am a generalist and primarily wrote for myself. I am sure a focused blogger could do better.) However, the most important thing is to get started with some kind of public presence. If SO or HN or github are what you feel comfortable with, start there. Don't be an anonymous programmer. If you are looking to blog, I think you should plan to stick with it for at least a year. Nothing is sadder than the abandoned blog. Here are some motivational tips: http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2129 http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2129
mikehain 10y ago
I used to have an issue with writing classes in college. Since the writers-to-be in the class aren't experts in any particular field, they are forced to pick sides in ridiculous polemic topics just to fill a page. This transfers over to the real world in the form of frivolous articles written to provide a constant stream of content to a readership. People like engineers and other folks with technical jobs have some of the best writing material to work with - all they really need to do is recount their day's work and the problems they've encountered, and any non-expert interested in the field can read and learn from it. There is a plumber who lives in my state who publishes video documentation of every job he goes on. Since I'm not a plumber, I learned a ton from these videos. All of the things he did would seem basic to anyone in his field, but for a lay person like myself, his videos were extremely educational.
- mdpopescu 10y ago
  > recount their day's work and the problems they've encountered Damn... I never thought of this. Great idea.
someguydave 10y ago
If I wrote an engineering blog the first post would be about how meaningless the word 'engineer' has become.
striglia 10y ago
By far the most frustrating part of blogging for me (though certainly not the only one) is the assumption that no one will ever see it. I can probably solve this by options I dislike -- giving up ownership to Medium or obnoxiously cross-posting to all social media platforms -- but the end result is I am discouraged before I even start. Oddly I love speaking at conferences...maybe because some nonzero audience is more or less guaranteed?
rdtsc 10y ago
I just like discussions on HN. I think if I aggregated them all over the years it would make a decent blog. I am lazy. With a blog I think I would just end up not updating it and after 2-3 years it would be abandoned. Is it better to see an abandoned blog or not blog at all...? I don't know I never really considered blogging for the recruiters, which it seems this article advocates. I also prefer a conversational style so that needs a others who are engaged and want to discuss things, otherwise it seems like I am broadcasting into the ether with nobody potentially ever reading or seeing it. Well technically it would be showing off for the potential recruiters here. But so far I never had problem getting good offers without the blog. I don't have Twitter Facebook, G+ or a LinkedIn. My GH profile is probably how they find me, which is fine so far. Also probably language specific mailing lists.
blueyes 10y ago
One of the rarest and most under-appreciated skills in tech is the ability to explain things. As an industry, we mostly focus on building and selling, and the twain don't always meet. Many of the builders have deep and excellent understanding of the tech they work with; many salespeople are excellent at persuading customers to do x. But there's a very important and underused bridge between insiders who understand, and everyone else. Blogging is a great exercise for deeply technical, because it's a chance for them to actively ask themselves: What do others not understand, and how can I explain it clearly?
- saxonklaxon 10y ago
  "If a thing be really good, it can be shown to be such. If you cannot demonstrate its excellence, it may well be suspected that you are no proper judge of it." -- William Godwin goo.gl/wylZZm
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Unfortunately, I don't think blogging improves this skill unless you get someone good at writing to review every post you make. I read (or rather, try to read) plenty of poor technical writing linked on HN and Lobsters every week. Because a lot of people blog as a form of self-documentation and to improve their "personal brand" activity, people rarely give or listen to writing criticism.
maxdemarzi 10y ago
The best way I've found is to blog what you learn. There is always somebody who is learning what you are learning and is a day behind you. They will benefit from your "experience" and being able to teach what you just learned means you know it well. 5 years and I haven't stopped learning. Http://maxdemarzi.com
shruubi 10y ago
Reading this, at least from my perspective, makes it seem like the author asks three questions, then provides an answer that doesn't really actually answer the three questions. In particular, from my own experience in blogging/twitter etc, getting an audience is a really hard thing to do, so much so that years later I haven't succeeded yet. On top of that, what about people who don't blog because they feel they have nothing interesting to say? Why should I write about my experiences with moving to modern javascript practices when 500 other people have already written the same thing, said all the same things I would have and actually have an audience that gives a shit?
nunez 10y ago
I agree. Such an easy way to market yourself and get your name out. Also, being able to write clearly is an incredibly useful skill to have.
ajharrison 10y ago
Engineers should stop telling other engineers what to do :)
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Ok, I'm kind of cynical when a recruiter says "You should blog! It will make it easier for us to find you." It sounds like the hunters suggesting to the game wardens that deer would be better off if you painted them international orange. :-) I certainly agree that public comments on the internet can help people get a sense of who you are, but just like sharing on Facebook or any other infinitely long lived expression of opinion there is also a huge down side to it. A number of good engineers have been fired over the years by blogging an opinion that their manager didn't like or mentioning an activity that their employer felt violated the inherent NDA in place in any employee/employer relationship.
ericjherrera 10y ago
I think the biggest thing is that any kind of writing makes you visible to the right audience. The key though is to know who you are writing to and make it tailored to them on their level. I think far too often people try to get their name out there and even though they should be writing for a specific crowd, in reality, they end up alienating the very people they were trying to tailor to. The writing should always be for yourself and in that way you will reach the right people. Let the rest fall into place.
xiaoma 10y ago
The title was editorialized. The word "every" was added to the title of the article.
- grzm 10y ago
  To elaborate, the actual title of the article is "Why Engineers Should Blog"
- dang 10y ago
  Ok, we restored the original title, except for the leading "Why", which we typically remove.
smdz 10y ago
> Marketplaces like UpWork and ELance, which were originally designed to match US companies with global talent, have literally made it impossible for US engineers to find work... As a freelancer working from India - this stands true even for the good experienced freelancers in India. Upwork (and Elance that is now Upwork) make it hard to get good rates - forget about raising rates. And when Elance merged to Upwork - it just made it harder to filter out good clients (I had some respect for the former Elance). Most buyer's have this perspective - "You are from India, your cost must be cheap!". Add to that rated courses on Udemy that underline "Get your work done at 1/10th the cost" (that I subscribed too) and similar stuff on YouTube. Blogging helps. Mine is a pretty small one. But I got quite a few leads from my blog and at one point I was heavily overloaded with requests that would give me acceptable rates. I stopped writing for 6-8 months and the leads stopped coming in. Also, these days video-bloggers(good ones) get to take much of the leads.
mememachine 10y ago
No, they shouldnt.
Animats 10y ago
1999 called. It wants personal websites back.
pleasecalllater 10y ago
Yep, they definitely will. My blog posts usually make my job interviews easier, as usually I hear "oh, we have read your blog post, so let's omit some of the questions we usually ask". Another funny thing is that you never know which posts will be popular. On my blog three old posts generate over 70% of the traffic. Some people have found them informative, and linked on a couple of pages.

172 points by patgenzler 10y ago

I think this misses another equally important reason, which is to do your part to help build the gift economy upon which we all rely in our day to day work. Near every common solution and recipe has been written up by someone, somewhere, and we all make use of these gifts. When you learn to do something useful that other people will likely also have to accomplish at some point in time, write it up. Not only will it benefit people out there in the world, but it is also a great way to ensure that you yourself don't have to reinvent the wheel a few years down the line. Who remembers the details after that long? So write it down, and if you write it down, you may as well publish it.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
While I agree generally with what you've written here, my only issue with it is that writing it up takes about as long as building the thing, and I'm pretty lazy. Also, if someone, somewhere, has written up nearly ever common solution, how do I know which ones are novel enough to put the effort in to publishing. Most of things I build aren't novel or new in any way, I'm fairly sure.
- wazanator 10y ago
  You will know what to write. When you spend time searching for an answer to an odd problem but don't find it and have to do it yourself you will want to write about it afterwards because you will want others to know you figured out the solution.
mooreds 10y ago
> do your part to help build the gift economy upon which we all rely in our day to day work Great point, but I think most folks aren't going to be persuaded. I asked a tech meetup how many folks had read from stackoverflow the past month. 95% of hands went up. Then I asked how many folks had answered a question. Far fewer, maybe 10%. And I think I was the only person who had asked a question on the site. The 90/9/1 rule is real. But I agree, we should encourage folks to join the 1% of content creators.

xiphias 10y ago

When I read ,,the only thing you need is an editor'', I thought how cool it would be if what I write would be reviewed by some people before going public...it would make me less shy about it. Then I realized he means a text editor (though he's an editor himself)

PretzelFisch 10y ago
That's my biggest problem, how do you improve your written communication without an editor? You can do the same thing over and over and call it practice, but without a reviewer how will you magically improve this skill?
- solipsism 10y ago
  Same way you acquire any other service. Pay for it, or know somebody.
- graeme 10y ago
  1. Post stuff for people to view. Pay attention to what is popular, and what isn't 2. Read stuff aloud before posting 3. Read widely, and pay attention to writing you like. I've built a business off of writing: https://lsathacks.com/explaantions/ https://lsathacks.com/explaantions/ I got started by writing a travel blog during a yearlong trip. I posted each entry to Facebook. When an entry got a lot of comments/views, I could tell it was better. I also got confidence that I was writing well. As I kept writing, I always made sure to show my work. And I found that reading aloud helped me find awkwards parts. Finally, I got started during a time when I was reading lots of blogs and novels. Good reading will help your writing. That's about it. Practice, tempered by feedback and observing the work of others.
  - kedean 10y ago
    The problem doing that with technical writing is that your audience isn't going to be judging you on your writing skills, they'll be judging you on the technical content. OP isn't worried about their technical content, they're worried about their writing skills. The technical audience is going to be affected by writing skills (it'll affect how well points are made, etc), but they aren't going to give feedback on that part. "Just ship it" doesn't work with soft skills.

tomjen3 10y ago

Thanks to Beeminder I stuck to blogging for a while (my results, such as they are, can be found on my website) even though I wasn't happy, and they are all full of horrible grammar. The only thing I learned from the project is that I really don't like blogging, I want to build stuff.

srcreigh 10y ago
What's the link to your blog?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

JCDenton2052 10y ago

No, every engineer should not blog. It is hard enough to find the right information when you have to shift through clickbait and the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal. If I was interested in assessing someone's caliber, I'd rather look at their Github than their blog. Anyone can write a blog post, not everyone can write good code. Blog if you have some insight into technology that hasn't been already elucidated or if you disagree with what's out there. Having said that, I plan to start my own blog at some point. What will I be writing about? I'll start with reviews of technical books. Why? Because I have read a couple since the beginning of the year that I was unhappy with and had to return, but bought them in the first place because other people said good things about them. Hopefully if someone in the future considers them they will come across my view and take it into consideration.

mgkimsal 10y ago
I don't particularly want everyone publishing code, really. "not everyone can write good code" Not everyone can tell what's good, what's not, and why. And searching through 20x the amount of code now to find something that a) works, b) is documented, c) is kept up to date (and is also accurate/correct) - just gets harder the more 'stuff' gets published.
srcreigh 10y ago
Tim didn't say it's useful for other engineers. He said it's useful 1) to get non-technical people can hear about your skills (the ones who couldn't tell good code from bad code) and 2) for yourself, since writing forces clear thinking.
nur0n 10y ago
Code and blog posts are just two ways of crystallizing ideas. In the same way that not everyone can write good code, not everyone can translate ideas clearly into blog format.
noobermin 10y ago
Another thing this turn hurts is this another avenue the "pretty people"[0] can use to get a foot in the door with little to no actual technical experience. I am reminded by a blogpost that got to the front page a few weeks ago about the "new Google OS" that was going to replace everything...written by an admitted non-coder/technical person. Many hackers are great at what they do, actually producing working, sensible products, but aren't bloggers. Sure, if you can do both, all the more power to you. People who can't blog (out of desire or time or just because they don't like writing may be) shouldn't be seen as any less a hacker because they don't. The best way to gauge a person's ability is their work, which github, et. al. is supposed to provide. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/28/beware-the-pretty-people/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/28/beware-the-pretty-people/

lossolo 10y ago

You should certainly blog if you did something different, something that is innovative, if you solved an interesting problem. But.. lets be honest, political correctness aside. Most software engineers have nothing to blog about, they just glue some libraries and make couple of db requests and that's about all they do. Nothing what they do is innovative or worth blogging about. Not every engineer should blog or we would see tens of thousands of new links everyday on HN that would point to another blog that writes about how someone wrote an api and did 3 mysql requests - That's called spam. We already have thousands of resources/articles/blog posts that solved those problems and unless you are bringing something new to the table, what you wrote was already written.

noobiemcfoob 10y ago
The specific problems encountered and methods that proved to be a workable solution for an engineer when gluing any set of arbitrary modules is practically guaranteed to be unique information, though mired in a ton other, more mundane information. It'll be the mark of a good writer to properly cut the content from the fat. But this isn't about being a good writer. It's about improving your own understanding and simply widening our dataset of known engineering practices.
katpas 10y ago
Sometimes gluing together libraries in a certain way can produce an error or behaviour that's not documented (as it's outside the scope of each individual project) as either nobody has tried to do that before or they've not written about it. Multiple times now it's been an obscure blog post found on google that's given the answer to those issues.

jconway45 10y ago

I stopped reading when you started to suggest engineers might work on Elance and the like..

codr4life 10y ago

I find that blogging helps me untangle messy reasoning, to the point where I often end up improving the code to make it easier to explain. The marketing angle is less interesting to me, I'm not selling anything. What's missing from the article is the bigger perspective; by sharing ideas and knowledge openly, everyone wins. https://github.com/codr4life/vicsydev https://github.com/codr4life/vicsydev

antingate2 10y ago

How about No?

donovanm 10y ago

Yeah I agree with this that most software engineers should consider this. It's another way to set yourself apart from the masses that most people will never put in the time and effort to do. The idea that other people put forward that you should only write about things if you think your ideas are innovative always seemed silly to me. A lot of things we think of as trivial could end up being useful and important information to someone else. Besides how are you supposed to know if what you're saying is 'innovative' before you say it and get feedback on it?

jlgaddis 10y ago
> A lot of things we think of as trivial could end up being useful and important information to someone else. This is very true. There have been many, many times when there's a technical article on the top of HN on a topic that I would never have imagined writing about simply because it seemed too basic or "entry-level". There have even been a few topics that I had actually considered writing about but dismissed it, thinking to myself "nah, everybody already knows that".
- holdenk 10y ago
  Some of the highest traffic blog posts I've written have been on the "entry-level" side of things.
  - mdpopescu 10y ago
    Now that I think about it, one of the pieces of advice I got most comments on was helping an indie writer figure out the intricacies of the "a" HTML tag :) [I left a comment on her blog and a lot of other indie writers thanked me for the details - they needed them when formatting books for Kindle.]

pavfarb 10y ago

Engineers should blog publicly when they have something to say. Something useful for their colleagues. Engineers shouldn't waste time forcing themselves to blog instead of work just to push their career forward: frequently they just expose they don't have anything to say in extremely unreadable way. What a waste of time for everybody. Soft skills helps you grow as an engineer, it's true, but I think it's important to understand that not every exercise should become a public material. But, in a generation publishing their every 2nd gym workout on instagram, who am I kidding anyway.

srcreigh 10y ago
Many times you don't know what's useful to your colleagues until you hit publish. Writing is useful as experimentation that way.
- katpas 10y ago
  Agreed, I tend to take the number of times I'm asked a question in person by someone new as a signal that a topic is worth writing up. It's also easier to sit down and come up with a well thought through answer that you can link out when asked again. Opposed to paraphrasing each time and potentially missing key points/clarity. For example, I wrote this up after meeting lots of clients when I was freelance who were regularly questioning why they couldn't find technical co-founders > https://hackernoon.com/developer-risk-profiles-why-you-wont-find-a-technical-co-founder-514381d9ad09#.2ii4tjj35 https://hackernoon.com/developer-risk-profiles-why-you-wont-...
- pavfarb 10y ago
  Writing is, publishing and noising the channels isn't. I'm afraid I find experimentation like that at cost of other people's time and attention to be a bit petty crime.
noobermin 10y ago
Do you want people who have a happening social media presence over productive and competent people? It rocks to have both, but one should be prioritized over the other. The moment soft-skills are more important than actually being able to deliver is the moment the game becomes politics.

Rapzid 10y ago

What do people view as good blogging platforms for this stuff these days? Jekyll on Github? Something else? I'd like to get going fast focusing on content, but of course want good syntax highlighting, comments, and such features.

joshvm 10y ago
Jekyll is pretty great (just chuck a disqus block in your footer), there's a real risk of getting bogged down in setting up the 'perfect' system with it and never getting round to publishing anything. I think Wordpress still has one of the most outstanding install experiences, but keeping it up to date is a pain.
- Rapzid 10y ago
  Cool, I may give Jekyll another shot(had a false start couple years ago). I have tons of experience doing hardened WP installs(and compromise root cause) but almost no experience USING it haha. I'd prefer not to go down that rabbit hole if something like Jekyll is sufficient.
  - UweSchmidt 10y ago
    If you only publish an blogpost once in a while, you wouldn't even need Jekyll. Figure out your template, and save your post in an .html file, add a link to the index.html and upload both to /var/www/ on your own cheap Linux cloud webspace. Markdown is nice, but if you don't need much you can sprinkle some <h..> and <b> tags on your post and you're done. There are browser based syntax highlighting tools where you can paste in your code from your IDE and get it back nicely formatted with the appropriate CSS. Might not be right for you, but I had to bring up the easiest, the truly minimalist, hey, the original way to it.
- nvarsj 10y ago
  Indeed, I think I've spent more time tweaking my jekyll based site than actually blogging. It was a lot simpler when I just had some html pages I edited in Emacs :).
10y ago

aarongeisler 10y ago

I think there is some truth to this. I landed my first startup engineering position via a blog post. This particular post only took 30 minutes to write - they can be short and sweet.

srcreigh 10y ago
This is awesome! Did you expect the post to get you a job? Do you have a link to it?

noobermin 10y ago

May be some hacker should make a NN to produce hipster-hacker blogposts so they don't need to. Just do a couple posts, train on those, and sit back and get both the creds for having a happening medium profile while maintaining your productivity.

0x006A 10y ago

ok then, lets turn this around: every blogger should code!

greglindahl 10y ago
Most jobs have "good communication skills" as a prereq. Compare with the fraction of jobs that require coding.

Chyzwar 10y ago

Blogging is waste of time. Most of blogs are paid PR/Marketing/SEO content that is low quality click-bait. Like this blog post that is PR piece for company that author works. Engineer should sharpen theirs skills on github. During interview github profile is much larger hiring factor than blog.

zzzcpan 10y ago
> Blogging is waste of time. It certainly is a waste of time for improving your engineering skills, it's a myth. But it isn't for PR, which is very important these days even to get somewhere in software engineering, not to mention for pushing any kind of product or attracting other engineers to hire.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  ... being able to explain things concisely and accurately is a skill that helps any engineer.
- Chyzwar 10y ago
  You are either Engineer or not. Writing blog post will have less of effect on your engineering skills than writing code.
  - zzzcpan 10y ago
    But it doesn't matter how great of an engineer you are if nobody knows about you.
  - saryant 10y ago
    I was able to step up to a major tech company because they noticed my blog posts, Stack Overflow answers and conference talks. That nearly doubled my income.

jlgaddis 10y ago

I maintained a blog for a few years (mostly while preparing to take the Cisco CCNP exams) but I haven't wrote regularly for going on five years. It was extremely beneficial to me in several ways. I ran into an issue with some HP ProCurve switches that HP basically said "yeah, that can't happen". It was only after writing it up -- along with a video -- and someone from HP reading it that they reached back out to me, flew an engineer out to "witness" it firsthand, and fix it. Later, they flew me out to Roseville for a few days to hang out with some of their engineers. Later, they invited me (and paid all my expenses) to attend an HP Tech Day as well as Interop NYC. In addition, I was invited to attend several Net Field Day [0] events where I got to hang out with some very smart people in the networking industry in Silicon Valley. Stephen Foskett, the guy behind NFD, knew about me from my blog. Also, while I was at one of the NFD events, I got an e-mail from someone who "knew me" from my blog. An ISP in my area needed a new Network Engineer to replace their main guy who had just left. They were about to start doing some new things and needed someone with lots of experience with OSPF and BGP in particular. After I returned, I met the owners to chat over breakfast one morning. I've been working there a little over five years now. I've done a handful of small "side jobs" as well, mostly for smaller companies whose IT guys found me via a Google search and reached out to me for assistance. Last, it's certainly not making me rich but (even though I really haven't written much in the last five years) the ads that appear on my blog (and Youtube videos) still earn enough so that Google has to send me a 1099 every year. Beer money. :-) ETA: I actually wrote up a similar post, "Why You Should Be Blogging" [1] in 2011. It was kinda sorta aimed at others studying for Cisco exams but I think it's probably general enough to apply to the HN crowd as well (I haven't re-read it recently, TBH). [0]: http://techfieldday.com/ http://techfieldday.com/ [1]: http://evilrouters.net/2011/10/20/why-you-should-be-blogging/ http://evilrouters.net/2011/10/20/why-you-should-be-blogging...

Buge 10y ago

>Recruiting systems are optimized to filter out false negatives (i.e eliminate people that don’t satisfy their bias) at the expense of false positives (i.e miss out on good people). I thought the definitions of false negative and false positive were the opposite.

mrlase 10y ago
It is the opposite. False positive in this context would be thinking someone is good when they're actually bad and vice versa for false negative...
rev_bird 10y ago
Yeah, I had trouble parsing that sentence, but I agree. Recruiting systems usually encourage false negatives.

lithos 10y ago

READ: I target engineers with email advertising/recruiting, and want you to make my job easier.

bloaf 10y ago

I'm surprised he didn't encounter the 4th reason for not blogging: 4. The topics I want to blog about are controversial. That is, strong but controversial opinions on certain technologies are just as likely to help you get noticed as hurt you (i.e. get noticed in a negative way.) Even if the topic isn't technically controversial, it can still be a negative. Revealing that you helped {religious minority church} set up their network, or that you solved a problem with {porn website} can also put a mark on you that is not automatically good. Heaven forbid you worked for/supported {political organization} this election cycle. So the answer is, of course, to self-censor. You have to strip out your opinion and context and only blog about technical details that you are very confident are correct. Keep your jokes gender neutral and your insights limited to your profession. But that's boring. That's not blogging, it's writing a corporate memo. We've just ratcheted up the difficulty, limited the new thoughts you're allowed to think, and made you invisible to all hiring managers who can't recognize when your technical manuscript applies to their industry.

mooreds 10y ago
I don't know if this is strictly true. I don't deny that blogging about controversial subjects will turn off possible employers or close doors. That is definitely something to be aware of. But you could look at the flip side of that and say that this is actually filtering out opportunities wouldn't be a fit. Much like qualifying leads in sales is something you want to do as quickly and easily as possible, doing the same for employment opportunities can help you focus on organizations where there is a culture fit. With respect to your example, if an employer was offended by your support for a minority group or political candidate, is that an employer you'd feel comfortable bringing your whole self to work at? I may be hopelessly Pollyanna, but I think I'd avoid that type of situation. If you are a software developer and those are the only type of opportunities you have access too, I agree, you should avoid blogging about such controversial topics. Or get good at remote work.
- bloaf 10y ago
  Strictly speaking, the only way my post can be untrue is if "fear of controversy" was not a reason people avoided blogging, or they feared controversy for an entirely different reason than the one I provided.

mooreds 10y ago

I love blogging. The OP makes some great points about how it exposes you to a different set of people than answers on stackoverflow or HN do. I have been blogging for over a decade and have definitely had some positive experiences, including a co worker finding a post when searching for a solution and an interviewer checking out my blog and mentioning it. I have also had a small bit of work come to me directly because of my blog. (However my blog is pretty unfocused in part because I am a generalist and primarily wrote for myself. I am sure a focused blogger could do better.) However, the most important thing is to get started with some kind of public presence. If SO or HN or github are what you feel comfortable with, start there. Don't be an anonymous programmer. If you are looking to blog, I think you should plan to stick with it for at least a year. Nothing is sadder than the abandoned blog. Here are some motivational tips: http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2129 http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2129

mikehain 10y ago

I used to have an issue with writing classes in college. Since the writers-to-be in the class aren't experts in any particular field, they are forced to pick sides in ridiculous polemic topics just to fill a page. This transfers over to the real world in the form of frivolous articles written to provide a constant stream of content to a readership. People like engineers and other folks with technical jobs have some of the best writing material to work with - all they really need to do is recount their day's work and the problems they've encountered, and any non-expert interested in the field can read and learn from it. There is a plumber who lives in my state who publishes video documentation of every job he goes on. Since I'm not a plumber, I learned a ton from these videos. All of the things he did would seem basic to anyone in his field, but for a lay person like myself, his videos were extremely educational.

mdpopescu 10y ago
> recount their day's work and the problems they've encountered Damn... I never thought of this. Great idea.

someguydave 10y ago

If I wrote an engineering blog the first post would be about how meaningless the word 'engineer' has become.

striglia 10y ago

By far the most frustrating part of blogging for me (though certainly not the only one) is the assumption that no one will ever see it. I can probably solve this by options I dislike -- giving up ownership to Medium or obnoxiously cross-posting to all social media platforms -- but the end result is I am discouraged before I even start. Oddly I love speaking at conferences...maybe because some nonzero audience is more or less guaranteed?

rdtsc 10y ago

I just like discussions on HN. I think if I aggregated them all over the years it would make a decent blog. I am lazy. With a blog I think I would just end up not updating it and after 2-3 years it would be abandoned. Is it better to see an abandoned blog or not blog at all...? I don't know I never really considered blogging for the recruiters, which it seems this article advocates. I also prefer a conversational style so that needs a others who are engaged and want to discuss things, otherwise it seems like I am broadcasting into the ether with nobody potentially ever reading or seeing it. Well technically it would be showing off for the potential recruiters here. But so far I never had problem getting good offers without the blog. I don't have Twitter Facebook, G+ or a LinkedIn. My GH profile is probably how they find me, which is fine so far. Also probably language specific mailing lists.

blueyes 10y ago

One of the rarest and most under-appreciated skills in tech is the ability to explain things. As an industry, we mostly focus on building and selling, and the twain don't always meet. Many of the builders have deep and excellent understanding of the tech they work with; many salespeople are excellent at persuading customers to do x. But there's a very important and underused bridge between insiders who understand, and everyone else. Blogging is a great exercise for deeply technical, because it's a chance for them to actively ask themselves: What do others not understand, and how can I explain it clearly?

saxonklaxon 10y ago
"If a thing be really good, it can be shown to be such. If you cannot demonstrate its excellence, it may well be suspected that you are no proper judge of it." -- William Godwin goo.gl/wylZZm
sotojuan 10y ago
Unfortunately, I don't think blogging improves this skill unless you get someone good at writing to review every post you make. I read (or rather, try to read) plenty of poor technical writing linked on HN and Lobsters every week. Because a lot of people blog as a form of self-documentation and to improve their "personal brand" activity, people rarely give or listen to writing criticism.

maxdemarzi 10y ago

The best way I've found is to blog what you learn. There is always somebody who is learning what you are learning and is a day behind you. They will benefit from your "experience" and being able to teach what you just learned means you know it well. 5 years and I haven't stopped learning. Http://maxdemarzi.com

shruubi 10y ago

Reading this, at least from my perspective, makes it seem like the author asks three questions, then provides an answer that doesn't really actually answer the three questions. In particular, from my own experience in blogging/twitter etc, getting an audience is a really hard thing to do, so much so that years later I haven't succeeded yet. On top of that, what about people who don't blog because they feel they have nothing interesting to say? Why should I write about my experiences with moving to modern javascript practices when 500 other people have already written the same thing, said all the same things I would have and actually have an audience that gives a shit?

nunez 10y ago

I agree. Such an easy way to market yourself and get your name out. Also, being able to write clearly is an incredibly useful skill to have.

ajharrison 10y ago

Engineers should stop telling other engineers what to do :)

ChuckMcM 10y ago

Ok, I'm kind of cynical when a recruiter says "You should blog! It will make it easier for us to find you." It sounds like the hunters suggesting to the game wardens that deer would be better off if you painted them international orange. :-) I certainly agree that public comments on the internet can help people get a sense of who you are, but just like sharing on Facebook or any other infinitely long lived expression of opinion there is also a huge down side to it. A number of good engineers have been fired over the years by blogging an opinion that their manager didn't like or mentioning an activity that their employer felt violated the inherent NDA in place in any employee/employer relationship.

ericjherrera 10y ago

I think the biggest thing is that any kind of writing makes you visible to the right audience. The key though is to know who you are writing to and make it tailored to them on their level. I think far too often people try to get their name out there and even though they should be writing for a specific crowd, in reality, they end up alienating the very people they were trying to tailor to. The writing should always be for yourself and in that way you will reach the right people. Let the rest fall into place.

xiaoma 10y ago

The title was editorialized. The word "every" was added to the title of the article.

grzm 10y ago
To elaborate, the actual title of the article is "Why Engineers Should Blog"
dang 10y ago
Ok, we restored the original title, except for the leading "Why", which we typically remove.

smdz 10y ago

> Marketplaces like UpWork and ELance, which were originally designed to match US companies with global talent, have literally made it impossible for US engineers to find work... As a freelancer working from India - this stands true even for the good experienced freelancers in India. Upwork (and Elance that is now Upwork) make it hard to get good rates - forget about raising rates. And when Elance merged to Upwork - it just made it harder to filter out good clients (I had some respect for the former Elance). Most buyer's have this perspective - "You are from India, your cost must be cheap!". Add to that rated courses on Udemy that underline "Get your work done at 1/10th the cost" (that I subscribed too) and similar stuff on YouTube. Blogging helps. Mine is a pretty small one. But I got quite a few leads from my blog and at one point I was heavily overloaded with requests that would give me acceptable rates. I stopped writing for 6-8 months and the leads stopped coming in. Also, these days video-bloggers(good ones) get to take much of the leads.

mememachine 10y ago

No, they shouldnt.

Animats 10y ago

1999 called. It wants personal websites back.

pleasecalllater 10y ago

Yep, they definitely will. My blog posts usually make my job interviews easier, as usually I hear "oh, we have read your blog post, so let's omit some of the questions we usually ask". Another funny thing is that you never know which posts will be popular. On my blog three old posts generate over 70% of the traffic. Some people have found them informative, and linked on a couple of pages.