9 ms·

Blog about what you've struggled with

202 points by yesenadam 5y ago

tkjef 5y ago
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.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  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.
- fsckboy 5y ago
  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.
  - yesenadam 5y ago
    > 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.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  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.
ElFitz 5y ago
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.
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  3 is why I write most of my blog posts
- corobo 5y ago
  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 :)
  - lmas 5y ago
    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..
k__ 5y ago
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.
rektide 5y ago
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.
- lmas 5y ago
  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.
xyzelement 5y ago
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.
tylermenezes 5y ago
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 (:
HexDecOctBin 5y ago
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.
- sxg 5y ago
  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.
- BugsBunny1991 5y ago
  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.
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    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
nocommandline 5y ago
This resonates with me. I recently tried to create demo videos for https://nocommandline.com 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)
- duncan-donuts 5y ago
  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.
- jart 5y ago
  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.
ant6n 5y ago
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.
- NortySpock 5y ago
  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 https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite
  - ant6n 5y ago
    "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
- benrbray 5y ago
  You might like Typora, which will handle image pasting for you. Some other software to look up: Foambubble, Obsidian, Dendron, Neuron Zettelkasten
  - ant6n 5y ago
    This looks really good, thanks for the tips!
- Lammy 5y ago
  > 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 https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD
andreyk 5y ago
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.
Waterluvian 5y ago
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"
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  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.
  - CannisterFlux 5y ago
    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?
    - Waterluvian 5y ago
      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.
  - Waterluvian 5y ago
    True. Maybe professionals need to manage building series like this utilizing amateurs.
asicsp 5y ago
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.
staysaasy 5y ago
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 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.
DawnEngine 5y ago
Plot twist: Do you know why you blog? If it's for fun, then I admire your time management. Go for it. If it's to make a name for yourself, executives would rather see media appearances, YouTube clips, or Coursera and Udemy courses from you.
henrik_w 5y ago
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-programming/ https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-pr...

202 points by yesenadam 5y ago

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.

cableshaft 5y ago
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.
fsckboy 5y ago
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.
- yesenadam 5y ago
  > 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.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
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.

ElFitz 5y ago

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.

EamonnMR 5y ago
3 is why I write most of my blog posts
corobo 5y ago
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 :)
- lmas 5y ago
  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..

k__ 5y ago

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.

rektide 5y ago

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.

lmas 5y ago
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.

xyzelement 5y ago

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.

tylermenezes 5y ago

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 (:

HexDecOctBin 5y ago

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.

sxg 5y ago
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.
BugsBunny1991 5y ago
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.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  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

nocommandline 5y ago

This resonates with me. I recently tried to create demo videos for https://nocommandline.com 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)

duncan-donuts 5y ago
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.
jart 5y ago
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.

ant6n 5y ago

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.

NortySpock 5y ago
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 https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite
- ant6n 5y ago
  "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
benrbray 5y ago
You might like Typora, which will handle image pasting for you. Some other software to look up: Foambubble, Obsidian, Dendron, Neuron Zettelkasten
- ant6n 5y ago
  This looks really good, thanks for the tips!
Lammy 5y ago
> 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 https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD

andreyk 5y ago

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.

Waterluvian 5y ago

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"

faeyanpiraat 5y ago
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.
- CannisterFlux 5y ago
  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?
  - Waterluvian 5y ago
    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.
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  True. Maybe professionals need to manage building series like this utilizing amateurs.

asicsp 5y ago

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.

staysaasy 5y ago

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 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.

DawnEngine 5y ago

Plot twist: Do you know why you blog? If it's for fun, then I admire your time management. Go for it. If it's to make a name for yourself, executives would rather see media appearances, YouTube clips, or Coursera and Udemy courses from you.

henrik_w 5y ago

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