5 ms·

Why I Blog

akhayam 3y ago
Great to see someone writing this as a structured thought. Thank you! I would add one thing that someone recently said to me and I felt it was the core reason of why I write blog-style docs (for my team or the general internet populace): "These are notes to myself so I can structure learnings and not repeat my own mistakes." Similar to your thought on "Distilling information" but a bit of a nuance that I think is worth highlighting.
appleaday1 3y ago
Thank you for the writeup, this will encourage me to blog. I have some domain names stored away, but it's been hard tackling those on right now, Shodan is sending me ssl expiration notices on the blogs I mantain for instance. I like the part about being replaceable particularly as I have not thought about that angle before, but I guess it comes down to the bus factor somewhat as well.
selfishprick 3y ago
Because you can't code.
- dang 3y ago
  We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do that - it will eventually get your main account banned as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
brightball 3y ago
I blog to clear my head. Usually at the point I write a blog posts it’s because I’ve had something on my mind and I know I won’t stop thinking about it until I write it down. It works too. Sometimes other people even read it.
denvaar 3y ago
Desire to become replaceable in order to continue working on new things is a refreshing take. It is a more positive, and imo, more realistic outlook than the usual one, which is more like, _I will be replaced and no longer be valuable/needed_.
Syonyk 3y ago
Similar to the benefits I've found of actually committing to a blog for the past... 8 years. Wow. The major benefits I've found: - I can "flush from active storage" anything I've written as a blog post. I know myself well enough to trust that anything weird, non-intuitive, or otherwise "would be helpful for doing this again in the future" will be documented in the post - so I can genuinely just forget everything about the project after I've written it up. - It encourages me to actually finish projects. I had a problem with a lot of "85% done" things, and it was both physical and mental clutter. They need to be finished to write about them, so I both get them finished and documented - freeing up both physical and mental space. - If I want to respond to something in a longer, more thought out form, I can. I've done this over the years, though it's less useful than it used to be - responding to the 500th time someone asks the same question with a link to your blog is now considered "self promotion" and therefore banned on lots of places I no longer bother with on the internet. - I occasionally get down weird rabbit holes and have months of post material from something that I simply can't find much information on. LED lighting (blue light, human health, sleep, etc), kerosene lanterns (beautiful, useful, and good winter heat in the deal), and an 11k word epic on lead acid batteries that should have been a few posts. I'll just say, having learned the hard way, own your hosting and pipeline. I tend to write on a lot of "gutless wonder" grade machines, and after Blogger ruined their interface for anyone without a Google-grade workstation, I ended up moving to my own hosting and Jekyll for rendering. It's now possible for me to move my (static file) hosting just about anywhere, and I'm not reliant on other people to not break that which I rely on. Don't suffer the pain of using someone else's platform, and learning in a few years that you have to migrate off. It's much easier to just use your own, and if you want to refactor things later, well, you just do it.
henrik_w 3y ago
My own reasons for blogging: - Know what I think. Writing it down makes me think a lot more about it. - Share what I have learnt. It's nice if something I know becomes useful for somebody else. - 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. Often comments on the posts, or discussions here or at Reddit add to my understanding. - To better remember. Reviewing a book or a course helps me remember a lot more of the content. - The thrill of having readers - Visibility. If people google me, hopefully the top result is my blog. - As an archive. I can send people links to my blog if we discuss something I have written about in the past. https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-programming/ https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-pr...
SenHeng 3y ago
On a slight tangent, I love reading the first posts of a blog. Especially when the subsequent posts are about the person building or designing said blog. It it’s really hard to find those kinds of posts or blogs. All the results on google are blog spam articles about making money with a blog. Can anyone recommend some? Here’s one of my favourite examples. https://destroytoday.com/blog/hello-world https://destroytoday.com/blog/hello-world
- hpb42 3y ago
  I recently redesigned mine, here's the post about it: https://heitorpb.github.io/bla/rewriting-in-rust/ https://heitorpb.github.io/bla/rewriting-in-rust/ And if you look a list of all entries, there's my "hello world" there as well.
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  I started collecting personal blogs on my site. You can find links here https://manuelmoreale.com/personal-blogs https://manuelmoreale.com/personal-blogs At that point you can just go to the first entry and see if it’s something that’s of interest to you. I also collected some 1000+ sites on https://theforest.link https://theforest.link and I’d say a solid 80% are probably personal blogs. So hopefully there’s at least a few of those firsts posts you’re talking about in there.
  - rambambram 3y ago
    Nice list and blog you have. You now have one subscriber more to your RSS feed. By the way, I disagree with your stance on RSS excerpts. ;)
    - manuelmoreale 3y ago
      Can you tell me why? I’m always interested in hearing from people with different opinions.
      - rambambram 3y ago
awesome_dude 3y ago
In addition to the positives already outlined the two biggest gains for me blogging are * Producing better documentation in a work capacity (that is, blogging has meant that the documentation that i produce at work has greatly improved). * Providing an outlet for me to "talk" about the things, in detail, that I have fallen in love with.
manuelmoreale 3y ago
Biggest benefit for me personally is the random interactions with people across the world that write in after they read something on my site. Being able to exchange thoughts and ideas with different people is priceless.
joemasilotti 3y ago
I write for 10 minutes every day. No word limit/count to hit. Just 10 minutes. It’s a surprisingly effective way to “flush” my head and get on with my life. It’s become part journal, part newsletter fuel, and part self documentation. I have no specific goal when my fingers hit the keyboard other than writing for 10 minutes. And it’s glorious to see where my thoughts take me. Sometimes I get so wrapped up I come out on the other side, an hour later and 1500 words lighter. Other times I struggle to even make a coherent sentence. Removing the need to be polished and perfect, I free myself to write as a stream of conscious. If I could disable my backspace key I would. Pops in my head = write it down. A surprisingly freeing exercise that I look forward to each morning. And if you’re curious, https://masilotti.com/articles https://masilotti.com/articles - you can see how I go from “serious” stuff to more fun, and then swing back the pendulum a few times. Enjoy!
aigoochamna 3y ago
I have rewritten my blog a few times... From a static HTML/CSS site to Ruby on Rails. From Rails to a pure Go MVC with my own templating format. From the custom Go server to static HTML/CSS on Github pages; to finally a Next.js with server side rendering and using markdown with frontmatter. I think the point of blogging is to do crazy things you can't get away with at work :)

Great to see someone writing this as a structured thought. Thank you! I would add one thing that someone recently said to me and I felt it was the core reason of why I write blog-style docs (for my team or the general internet populace): "These are notes to myself so I can structure learnings and not repeat my own mistakes." Similar to your thought on "Distilling information" but a bit of a nuance that I think is worth highlighting.

appleaday1 3y ago

Thank you for the writeup, this will encourage me to blog. I have some domain names stored away, but it's been hard tackling those on right now, Shodan is sending me ssl expiration notices on the blogs I mantain for instance. I like the part about being replaceable particularly as I have not thought about that angle before, but I guess it comes down to the bus factor somewhat as well.

selfishprick 3y ago

Because you can't code.

dang 3y ago
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do that - it will eventually get your main account banned as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

brightball 3y ago

I blog to clear my head. Usually at the point I write a blog posts it’s because I’ve had something on my mind and I know I won’t stop thinking about it until I write it down. It works too. Sometimes other people even read it.

denvaar 3y ago

Desire to become replaceable in order to continue working on new things is a refreshing take. It is a more positive, and imo, more realistic outlook than the usual one, which is more like, _I will be replaced and no longer be valuable/needed_.

Syonyk 3y ago

Similar to the benefits I've found of actually committing to a blog for the past... 8 years. Wow. The major benefits I've found: - I can "flush from active storage" anything I've written as a blog post. I know myself well enough to trust that anything weird, non-intuitive, or otherwise "would be helpful for doing this again in the future" will be documented in the post - so I can genuinely just forget everything about the project after I've written it up. - It encourages me to actually finish projects. I had a problem with a lot of "85% done" things, and it was both physical and mental clutter. They need to be finished to write about them, so I both get them finished and documented - freeing up both physical and mental space. - If I want to respond to something in a longer, more thought out form, I can. I've done this over the years, though it's less useful than it used to be - responding to the 500th time someone asks the same question with a link to your blog is now considered "self promotion" and therefore banned on lots of places I no longer bother with on the internet. - I occasionally get down weird rabbit holes and have months of post material from something that I simply can't find much information on. LED lighting (blue light, human health, sleep, etc), kerosene lanterns (beautiful, useful, and good winter heat in the deal), and an 11k word epic on lead acid batteries that should have been a few posts. I'll just say, having learned the hard way, own your hosting and pipeline. I tend to write on a lot of "gutless wonder" grade machines, and after Blogger ruined their interface for anyone without a Google-grade workstation, I ended up moving to my own hosting and Jekyll for rendering. It's now possible for me to move my (static file) hosting just about anywhere, and I'm not reliant on other people to not break that which I rely on. Don't suffer the pain of using someone else's platform, and learning in a few years that you have to migrate off. It's much easier to just use your own, and if you want to refactor things later, well, you just do it.

henrik_w 3y ago

My own reasons for blogging: - Know what I think. Writing it down makes me think a lot more about it. - Share what I have learnt. It's nice if something I know becomes useful for somebody else. - 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. Often comments on the posts, or discussions here or at Reddit add to my understanding. - To better remember. Reviewing a book or a course helps me remember a lot more of the content. - The thrill of having readers - Visibility. If people google me, hopefully the top result is my blog. - As an archive. I can send people links to my blog if we discuss something I have written about in the past. https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-programming/ https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-pr...

SenHeng 3y ago

On a slight tangent, I love reading the first posts of a blog. Especially when the subsequent posts are about the person building or designing said blog. It it’s really hard to find those kinds of posts or blogs. All the results on google are blog spam articles about making money with a blog. Can anyone recommend some? Here’s one of my favourite examples. https://destroytoday.com/blog/hello-world https://destroytoday.com/blog/hello-world

hpb42 3y ago
I recently redesigned mine, here's the post about it: https://heitorpb.github.io/bla/rewriting-in-rust/ https://heitorpb.github.io/bla/rewriting-in-rust/ And if you look a list of all entries, there's my "hello world" there as well.
manuelmoreale 3y ago
I started collecting personal blogs on my site. You can find links here https://manuelmoreale.com/personal-blogs https://manuelmoreale.com/personal-blogs At that point you can just go to the first entry and see if it’s something that’s of interest to you. I also collected some 1000+ sites on https://theforest.link https://theforest.link and I’d say a solid 80% are probably personal blogs. So hopefully there’s at least a few of those firsts posts you’re talking about in there.
- rambambram 3y ago
  Nice list and blog you have. You now have one subscriber more to your RSS feed. By the way, I disagree with your stance on RSS excerpts. ;)
  - manuelmoreale 3y ago
    Can you tell me why? I’m always interested in hearing from people with different opinions.
    - rambambram 3y ago

awesome_dude 3y ago

In addition to the positives already outlined the two biggest gains for me blogging are * Producing better documentation in a work capacity (that is, blogging has meant that the documentation that i produce at work has greatly improved). * Providing an outlet for me to "talk" about the things, in detail, that I have fallen in love with.

manuelmoreale 3y ago

Biggest benefit for me personally is the random interactions with people across the world that write in after they read something on my site. Being able to exchange thoughts and ideas with different people is priceless.

joemasilotti 3y ago

I write for 10 minutes every day. No word limit/count to hit. Just 10 minutes. It’s a surprisingly effective way to “flush” my head and get on with my life. It’s become part journal, part newsletter fuel, and part self documentation. I have no specific goal when my fingers hit the keyboard other than writing for 10 minutes. And it’s glorious to see where my thoughts take me. Sometimes I get so wrapped up I come out on the other side, an hour later and 1500 words lighter. Other times I struggle to even make a coherent sentence. Removing the need to be polished and perfect, I free myself to write as a stream of conscious. If I could disable my backspace key I would. Pops in my head = write it down. A surprisingly freeing exercise that I look forward to each morning. And if you’re curious, https://masilotti.com/articles https://masilotti.com/articles - you can see how I go from “serious” stuff to more fun, and then swing back the pendulum a few times. Enjoy!

aigoochamna 3y ago

I have rewritten my blog a few times... From a static HTML/CSS site to Ruby on Rails. From Rails to a pure Go MVC with my own templating format. From the custom Go server to static HTML/CSS on Github pages; to finally a Next.js with server side rendering and using markdown with frontmatter. I think the point of blogging is to do crazy things you can't get away with at work :)