There’s a blog post for everything

Also, for those new to Juhis: It’s almost scary how this guy here has a blog post about whatever it is you’re thinking about, and a good one too! - Marijke Luttekes

When I joined Djangonaut Space Discord a month ago and introduced myself, Marijke posted the above to my intro thread. It’s a high praise but also funny how it’s often true.

In a way, it’s not that surprising though: when you write a lot of things over many years. This blog sits at 639 blog posts at the time of writing, not including this one. That’s not all I’ve written though: especially for pre-2018 posts, I’ve only brought in a portion from old blogs to this site, I have other blogs and publish my notes elsewhere and so on.

Marijke’s comment inspired me to ramble a bit about blogging so here we go.

Why and what to write about

I’ve earlier written about how three is a pattern as a guideline for when is the last moment I write about something. I’ve spent years in the developer communities and especially with early learners, juniors, students and alike so the same topics come up constantly.

I’ve always encouraged people to participate in meetups also outside their daily technologies because the problems are universal and sometimes you get good new perspectives when you look and think of them from a different view point.

These days when I talk about why developers should blog , I don’t even count to three. If you did something where you learned a new thing or had to do some googling, asking questions and exploring documentation, that’s the point when you should write things down for yourself and most of those can be turned into published blog posts.

Imagine having a resource that has been written specifically for you, based on research, documentation and other people’s experiences. That’s what my technical notes and blog posts are. I return back to them regularly because the same (or similar enough) challenges come up regularly in my day-to-day. It feels wasted to always start from the scratch — and especially painful when you kind of remember that you’ve seen this before but can’t remember where.

Once you start writing these down, whether in a blog post or personal notes, it’s a good habit to include your own stuff to when you’re searching for information. In Search your notes first I touched on this briefly (I should write a longer post focused on this one day). Every time I search anything online on my laptop, I see results from my own notes. I’m a lazy man: years of conditioning to write search queries to browser’s url bar is so deeply engrained to me that I found including the results there is more effective than trying to change my workflow to search in a different app first.

Writing and reading as a learning tool

I’ve learned so much from other people’s blog posts . “Obligated” is a strong word and I’m using it as a bit of a hyperbole here but I do feel a sense of obligation to not pull the ladder up after me but to help contribute to future generations by blogging and sharing what I’ve learned.

Even if I just write for myself, I often see that writing improves my technical/development work as well. Sometimes I use it as a refactoring tool: I build something and when I write about it, I spot bad code, inconsistencies, things I want to explain for them to make sense and it gives me an opportunity to go back and fix my code. Other times, I do something akin to documentation-driven development where I start a new feature development by writing end user documentation. Occasionally, I write a blog post from a “how I would like the story about it to be” and then that helps me get over some hurdles that I’m stuck with.

Communication as a skill

I would lie if I’d say I’m doing this completely from altruistic motivations. Far from it. I write because I’ve fallen in love with writing. It’s also a strong career move in multiple ways.

First, writing is communication and communication is a crucial skill in knowledge industry like software development. The way you become better at it is to practice and blogging is a great, low-threshold, low-stakes way to do that on your own terms. Every now and then I hear a sentiment of “we can’t all be great writers” in a way that communicates that writing is some kind of innate talent rather than a learned skill.

Second, writing is a good way to let people know what you know and where your interests are. It takes time but if you’re doing it consistently and get better at your writing, people start to notice. Tim Schilling has a great post about why blogging is a great tool in job hunting.

It took me at least a decade of blogging with some sort of regularity until it started to bear fruit but I’ve gotten a lot of interesting opportunities in life — both as career opportunities as well as other, less career-focused things — because I’ve been actively writing about my learning and experience.

Advent of Code as an entry point

If you’re a software developer thinking “how do I get started?”, I have good news. Advent of Code starts again December 1st and you’ll get a puzzle to solve every day for a couple of weeks. Solve the puzzle and write about it. I’ve been writing educational posts about solving them with Python for years now . I like AoC as a springboard to technical blogging is that you don’t have to come up with topics. Eric Wastl has created these puzzles for you and that gives a nice framework for a blog series.

Advent of Code is also good topic because there’s a lot of us writing about the solutions and even more people interested in reading them. In addition to daily puzzles, I often find interesting more general topics arise from them that I can write about in a more evergreen note format — which also helps you in the future years of solving the puzzles as you build a knowledge base.