What to blog about

https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/

by Tomte • 4 years ago

333 90 4 years ago

twic• 4 years ago

It’s easy to get hung up on this. I’ve definitely felt the self-imposed pressure to only write something if it’s new, and unique, and feels like it’s never been said before. This is a mental trap that does nothing but hold you back.

No! It's absolutely correct and considerate! This advice to write a blog even if you have nothing new to add is why the blogosphere is now absolutely overgrown with low-content dross, and half the reason why searches for technical questions now just turn up endless blogspam instead of answers.

mcbishop• 4 years ago

It really depends on the writer's motivation. Practicing regular public writing... awesome. Trying to rank for keywords... blah.

You have zero obligation to engage with someone's personal blog (that most likely will never show up in search results).

rpastuszak3• 4 years ago

Precisely, I get the sentiment/frustration expressed in the parent comment, but this is a curation, discoverability issue.

uncleshelby• 4 years ago

Who's to say that someone really does or doesn't have something "new" to say? New can be explaining something simpler way, as far as the writer understands it, and discouraging people from writing and getting experience through writing is pretty inconsiderate as I see it.

fm26062• 4 years ago

So my very first thought of reading this comment is "I 100% whole-hardily agree".

But...

I have read a few posts from different people who say blog about it even if it isn't new or unique. The thought being is that it 1) improves writing skill and 2) if learning something, helps cements the concepts of what was learned.

It appears the Simon Wilson shared the same feeling about posts being new and unique as can seen here from his 2nd post in 2002: https://simonwillison.net/2002/Jun/12/bloggingAintEasy/

"with each post hopefully adding a new angle to the topic in hand"

Obviously he has changed his mind through the years which we are allowed to do.

And as I type this and think about the commenter's statement about "low-content dross", I would much rather sift through a bunch of individual posts from real people than from businesses trying to promote some product.

NikolaNovak• 4 years ago

Agreed.

Also, there's a bit of "you can't get there from here" problem : maybe you need to start writing familiar, personal stuff, to practice, get into a habit, develop better writing skills, gain confidence, etc - so that when you do have something truly unique, you are ready and capable of putting it down in an engaging and I understandable.

(also, "style" matters. James Mickens does not necessarily say anything "new", but he says it in a way that's entertaining and enables you to see things from a new perspective. I enjoy Terry pratchett and patio11 for their writing style even when they're not sharing extraordinary insights. Not every piece of writing needs to be cutting edge technical research. And practice is important for that).

Smaug123• 4 years ago

By the way, "whole-heartedly", as in "with your whole heart". As opposed to "foolhardily", as in "with the hardiness (boldness) of a fool [who doesn't understand the need for caution]".

rpastuszak3• 4 years ago

half the reason why searches for technical questions now just turn up endless blogspam instead of answers.

To me this sounds more like a discoverability/curation issue[^1]. Most of the useless technical content I find is either spam from a content farm or poorly written, superficial articles with a higher SEO ranking due to the platform they were published on (e.g. dev.to).

What I find very rarely is crappy content placed at the top of the search results and coming from an obscure low-quality blog.

No! It's absolutely correct and considerate!

I do agree that it's considerate, that it's a question worth asking, but the reasons people might decide that it's not worth sharing their knowledge might not reflect reality (impostor syndrome, shyness, Dunning-Kruger effect). We're missing on those more considerate people not sharing their knowledge, so I'd say the more the merrier, it's still a net-positive.

Developers are notorious for underestimating the value of clear communication. It's apparent even here on HN, where people _express_ themselves in a precise manner but often don't think/care how to _communicate_, i.e. their response will be understood by other commenters (symptoms: nitpicking, hermetic language, ignoring the context of a post, tone deafness, lack of empathy). Writing, as a means of communication provides the best avenue to acquire this skill.

[^1] And, for that I blame mainly ad-tech. An ad-free search engine with blocklists would improve the situation drastically.

tomashubelbauer2• 4 years ago

I apologize, but this is complete bullshit. I think everyone should write for themselves first, as a way to reference your jotted down knowledge at a later time or to summarize your thoughts on something and see how well you've mapped it out. Or just for joy. It is the responsibility of the reader/follower of the blog to only subscribe to blogs that post articles that they appreciate and stop reading them if they no longer feel like they do.

cpach• 4 years ago

Yeah but the spam blogs are there because people are trying to make money from ads, those are not authors that are writing a journal or want to practise their writing skills.

baxtr• 4 years ago

No! Absolutely not.

Because: you might think it’s nothing new. But it’s only nothing new for you! For most people it’s entirely new.

Sure, somewhere someone already farted about it lot an earlier than you. But guess what, it’s the f*ing internet. Ofc someone else was faster.

This advice you’re giving is actually exactly why there is so much BS on the internet.

Because smart people like us who have something to share won’t because it’s not new enough!!!

And guess what: all the morons not thinking 1/10 as much publish away and get followers because they dare to expose themselves often and repeatedly.

Btw I think it’s called imposter syndrome.

hexis• 4 years ago

My website is not about whatever I learned today, it's about me. As it happens, what I learned today is a thing about me, so it can end up on my website. But, if you're coming to my personal website to see exclusively brand new information, never before published, then I'm sorry but I'm a person much like most other folks and my experiences overlap with them quite a lot. My website will be full of ordinary, shared experiences and facts, with the occasional novelty thrown in, much like myself.

I'd hate to only show the parts of myself that are perfectly unique to the world, I think that'd be very lonely.

twelve40• 4 years ago

isn't yours more of a complaint about the _searching_ part? people shouldn't self-sensor out of fear of unoriginality and it's really up to the fabled algorithm to sort this out.

mminer237• 4 years ago

I don't think only person should only ever write on each topic. It's good to have some retreading so healthy disagreement can be shared, views reinforced, different nuances explained, or everything just put another way. I've often read something, not really got it, and read someone else explain the same thing a bit differently where it clicked better for me.

I think the important thing is just to know what you're writing about. Too many people write about things they think will tell highly but they only have the most surface-level knowledge of. That's the real problem.

csydas• 4 years ago

I think you're conflating SEO blogspam with genuine passion for writing.

One claims to be the other in order to shield itself from accusations of being SEO blogspam, the other is just a person wanting to share their experience.

I have no issues reading about how someone discovered how TTL can help in a Wireshark investigation, even though I already know it. I do have issues with someone's blog showing in online searches simply because they figured out which keywords to place (and where) in order to get to page 1 of Google, displacing actual articles of relevance to what I'm seeking. It's an absolute shame that actual companies have fallen to the same trap and even intentionally push preferable articles that result in fewer Support cases while burying the actual issue under SEO'd garbage. (The less said about Microsoft "dead-links" where they retroactively remove the content, the better)

I would love to read about a first timer understanding recursion; my hopes would be either that I would learn a new way of understanding it myself because of the enthusiasm they had as a result of their moment of inspiration, or I can add to the discourse on my own understanding.

I want to read about discovery and education! I don't want to read inspirational articles or how to monetize/appeal to investors when I'm looking for technical things.

My favorite part of mentoring is seeing my mentees make it work by their own inspiration and mental skill; I don't care if it's inefficient as long as they did it on their own. We can discuss optimizations later, I just want to see people pushing themselves to a new level and be excited about it. They can write an entire Russian-Novel length post as far as I'm concerned, I will read and revel in every word as long as it's their excitement because of their success.

quietbritishjim2• 4 years ago

I think the truth is somewhere in between. If someone wants to write about what they've done for writing's sake, then fair enough to go the extra step of posting a blog about it. But there are plenty of blogs that seem to exist because the person first decided they wanted to have a blog and then came up with something to write about. Not SEO spam, more like résumé spam maybe? Those are still awful to wade through on search see l results.

philzook2• 4 years ago

I don't agree. If someone has gotten to the point they think they can write anything about a subject it's kind of interesting. Many, many things are undocumented because they are trivial to some and completely unknown to others. Experts rarely want to spend time writing about trivial things, so the best way to get these things written is during their journey to expertise when they are new and exciting and when it feels the most scary and embarrassing to do so. In addition, I think people overestimate how long they will retain insights even for personal use. I really, really wish I had been blogging during my education.

simonw3• 4 years ago

There's no space limit on the internet.

If you want people to do writing that shares unique, new ideas you need to allow them the opportunity to practice writing first!

AlbertCory• 4 years ago

Isaac Asimov wrote "Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare" and some talk show host asked him "Why did you write this? There are thousands of books about Shakespeare!"

He said, "Yeah, but not by me."

CM30• 4 years ago

The thing you need to realise is that different people find different takes on the same idea better than others. Maybe they find one author's writing style or presentation easier to follow than another's. Maybe they're a fan of said author, and enjoy hearing their takes on everything they write about. Or maybe they just one person's writing more engaging than another's.

Multiple people covering the same story isn't a bad thing, regardless of whether it's in the form of a blog post, video, podcast, TV show, book or any other format. It's like how multiple brands of sweets, soda or toothpaste exist.

derekzhouzhen• 4 years ago

You are mixing authenticity and uniqueness. The stuff you blog about doesn't need to be unique; it only needs to be authentic.

theideaofcoffee• 4 years ago

In the words of the venerable AvE: "Make cool shit, put it on the internet." Have I been able to follow that? Not really, too many other things going on but I think the sentiment is nice.

markx2• 4 years ago

In the words of the venerable AvE: "Make cool shit, put it on the internet." Have I been able to follow that?

'cool shit'

who defines that? The reader.

'cool shit' could be about how you feel in a relationship, how you just cooked The Best Food Ever, how your pet made you laugh, a joke, an insightful sentence / paragraph that you read, something you saw, something you felt.

Just write.

If it is useful to you, then just write.

heavyset_go3• 4 years ago

I interpreted that differently. 'Cool shit' is whatever the author thinks is cool. The internet lets other people who are interested in the same stuff find the stuff that you find cool and wrote about, too.

simonw3• 4 years ago

I'd add a third step. "Make cool Shit, put it on the internet, then write something about it."

1121redblackgo• 4 years ago

skookum!

0xJRS• 4 years ago

keep your stick on the ice!

flashgordon• 4 years ago

You know I am going to confess to a couple of biasses here.

Bias 1 - When I saw the article title in the listing of all the new submissions on hacker news, I thought to myself - "Sheesh, Here is somebody who wants to just become popular without a goal in mind. Why can't they just work on some thing they are passionate about and write about that to teach others"

Bias 2 - then I clicked on the article and saw who The author was. Oh damn there MUST be something poignant here.

I am pretty sure two biases don't unbias each other. Either way Simon has really good points in documenting your TIL items. As someone who can lose track of time building and coding, blogging is the last thing on my mind (unless a blog post is a pr for a new feature I am releasing), Simon's advice strikes a nice balance!

guynamedloren3• 4 years ago

My problem is I get stuck at the very last step: publishing.

I take copious, detailed, organized notes for everything I do (house renovations, DIY projects, programming projects) with a robust system that I've fine tuned over the years. This habit has proven to be invaluable for me, as I continuously reference notes and learnings from many years prior.

However, by the time it comes to editing and publishing, I've already moved onto something else.

These days I make myself do it: I tell myself that writing about something is the cost I have to pay for building it. And I always end up feeling that the effort was more than worthwhile.

This might work? Sometimes it's a tiny mental shift that changes everything.

tomashubelbauer2• 4 years ago

I think writing in public might work for you. Don't do drafts, instead, start an article with just a title if you have to and progressively refine it. IMO an article's lifetime is much more than just the initial day or so after publishing it. Sure, that's when it will most likely get the most attention, and if you're optimizing for that, this might not be the best advice, but if not, it sounds like something that might work well for you.

rpastuszak3• 4 years ago

Like with every habit, there's less and less friction with every finished attempt. (speaking from personal experience, I'm terrible at publishing consistently)

This might work? Sometimes it's a tiny mental shift that changes everything.

Could be. What works for me is finding something small enough that I can't overcomplicate it (write today, edit and publish tomorrow, done!). Then, I will (obviously) overcomplicate it, but instead of ending up with a week-long commitment, I spend 3-4 evenings instead of 2. (example: https://sonnet.io/posts/reactive-hole/)

I would also suggest treating writing a post (or a series) as a project itself.

I feel like we're struggling with a similar problem. Good luck!

examplary_cable• 4 years ago

Have you seen the "Learn in Public" thing?

This is where everything you do is by default public. You might want to look into it.

philzook2• 4 years ago

It's not for everyone, but I keep running notes in a special section of my blog, which is hosted on github pages, so it all just stays in sync across multiple computers on a repo. I have found it useful even for myself looking up stuff, and maybe people find your half finished notes useful or not. I'm a big fan of lowering the barrier. Perfect is the enemy of the good.

If I leave something as an unpublished draft, it's game over. There's too many things.

turkeygizzard• 4 years ago

Maybe start out not editing and just publishing your raw notes if you can. If people express interest, that might incentivize you to start editing. Basically prototype your writing.

Also, I find editing easiest with some time between writing and editing. Time away allows me to digest my own thoughts more and also makes my writing less precious to me. I sort of become a reader to my own posts and find it much more palatable to edit at that point

iLoveOncall3• 4 years ago

I've been looking at the Zettelkasten note taking method recently, and one of the things it forces you to do is write notes that are pretty much publication-ready. The main use case of the method is publication actually.

Of course it's more upfront investment, but then you arrive at a state where it's more about selecting the notes you want to put together to form your article and just write a few sentences to connect the dots before your article is ready.

This may suit you if you're ready to invest more initially.

ar_lan3• 4 years ago

I’ve tried Zettelkasten for about a year now - it’s a massive time sink, and I’m not sure I’ve seen enough fruits to be worth it, to be honest.

But I also don’t publish writing so maybe that’s my fault!

soldeace• 4 years ago

For the record, I'm now interested in your note-taking system and would love to read more about it.

guynamedloren3• 4 years ago

I received an email inquiring about my note-taking system, so I'll copy-paste my response here:

Nothing revolutionary about my system. The short answer is that I use Notion, because it checks a lot of boxes right out of the gate: it's cross-platform, easily searchable, shareable, and strikes that perfect balance between unstructured and structured data.

The longer answer is: I have top-level documents for each facet of my life, and each of those documents is organized with a particular structure to optimize for a particular use case. Much of it ends up as some combination of nested documents, databases, and kanban-style boards. The databases and kanban boards make use of templates to normalize data whenever possible.

For example, I have a top-level "Automotive" document. Within that document are sub-documents for each of my vehicles. Each vehicle document primarily serves as a quick reference with vehicle metadata like VIN number, license plate number, etc, and maybe some general notes. The vehicle document contains a "Maintenance Log", which is a kanban board to track upcoming maintenance, completed maintenance, repairs, and everything in between. The maintenance items are templatized to streamline entry and reduce cognitive overhead.

I've found that the combination of templatized kanban boards and free form documents can be applied to basically anything, from programming projects, to house renovations, managing job interviews, cooking / menu planning, etc, with slight variations to adapt to a given use case.

I'm really pleased with how well this system has worked for me, and have considered writing about it in more detail. How meta. Perhaps I should blog about it :)

heavyset_go3• 4 years ago

I have a /notes/ section on my site just for this. They're living documents that get updated and edited over time, they're never really "done". Turns out people get value from these even if I wouldn't describe them as real articles.

Running something like TiddlyWiki or Wiki.js for notes also helps with the publishing aspect, all you have to do is make your wiki accessible from the wider internet and you're done.

32gbsd• 4 years ago

This is good. I always encourage output vs constant consumption.

boyter• 4 years ago

I have always found that my blog is a place for me to dump my thought process and ideas behind things. A journal I can refer back to, with myself being the main audience first. As such I also put in the answers to annoying problems such as overcoming “The "clang" command requires the command line developer tools” issue oh M1 macs.

I have found over time that the posts solving those sort of issues tend to get the most traffic, and give me the most positive responses with people online too.

In either case I strongly suggest to everyone I work with to just write those sort of posts. Keep them online and over years they build up into something you can show off.

r4v3n• 4 years ago

I agree with this article and the advice given in it. Running your blog is very rewarding and it's your digital corner. I always find sad to see people writing exciting things in twitter threads that last 40 tweets. It's painful to read and your content may disappear one day. Nowadays it's so easy to have a blog technically that you shouldn't miss it. Have a blog and enjoy yourself.

bachmeier• 4 years ago

I like reading TIL-type posts when I'm searching for a particular topic. Sometimes a straightforward "this is how to do it" is what I'm after. Most of the time, it's nice to have some context: what were you doing, why did you need to do this, etc. That makes the post unique and, importantly, gives me some additional ideas related to the topic.

ok_dad2• 4 years ago

Here’s what I want for a technical blog platform: some way to add tests to the code in the article so that if the tests fail the article notifies the reader it might be out of date. One test could be “is the software version used here super old?”

I don’t know how many times I’ve read how to do Y with X language and I find it’s incredibly out of date and not I should be doing Y differently, or maybe doing Z instead.

simonw3• 4 years ago

You could absolutely get something like that working using GitHub Actions.

My TIL blog is served out of a GitHub repo - it doesn't have tests against content in the TILs themselves yet, but it wouldn't be a big stretch to add that.

Something like nbdev might fit this idea well too: https://nbdev.fast.ai/

ok_dad2• 4 years ago

Thanks, I think for an upcoming hobby project I might follow your lead and write a blog for myself. I’m trying out zig, and documentation is lacking, so maybe it’ll help some other people get a start. It’ll also give me something to point to in lieu of programming interviews.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

What would also work, similarly is build your blog using vercel/netlify with tests as part of the deployment processes but are scripts you can run local too.

xrd• 4 years ago

I think this is good advice. There are lots of links to an exact piece of code if you go to stack overflow. But few detailed discussions of how you get to the right answer and that's really helpful to beginners.

Julia Evans, who is currently in the front page of HN again, basically writes a variant of TIL all the time.

https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/11/06/making-a-dns-query-in-ruby-f...

swyx• 4 years ago

So there's two things here: TILs and projects. I'm running a dev writers' retreat next week and happen to be thinking about this, want to suggest more:

- Superlatives: An interesting story about the first/last/best/worst experience when you did X. You see a lot of these in Rachelbythebay's work (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) . Mtlynch focuses more on documenting his journey semi-realtime (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)

- Data & News: This is a lot of work but collect data for yourself and publish it for others and others will find that useful. This is the strategy I am adopting for AI stuff https://lspace.swyx.io/p/open-source-ai. Dan Luu does this a lot to back up his work https://danluu.com/ The cutting edge of data is news, and you can see this on Gergely's substack (https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/) but you're basically a journalist at that point

- How $POPULAR_THING Works: This is Fly.io's (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and Alex Xu's strategy https://blog.bytebytego.com/

- Overviews: What your part of the dev ecosystem looks like to you. It'll never be perfect, it can't be. Some folks on HN will tear you to shreds for missing something obvious. But it will be immensely helpful to people just behind you in experience. See: How I write backends (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106482), The evolution of the data engineer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33317126), and my AWS vs Cloudflare post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28903982). Overviews become "Insights" when you can successfully reframe something in a new light that is useful for people to understand what is going on.

- Predictions/Wishlists: What is missing from your part of the ecosystem. The complement of the above. You can also invert it into a complaint post, like https://circleci.com/blog/its-the-future/ or https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2... but those are less constructive if entertaining

- Principles: Timeless things, a superset of the previous two points. See rauchg (Nextjs cocreator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8559519) and dan abramov (react core team - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18792373

- Caching: Anything - ANYTHING - you look up more frequently than 1x a year (For concepts, I have a Three Strikes Rule https://www.swyx.io/three-strikes, For lists, I have persistent lists https://www.swyx.io/fave-podcasts and https://www.swyx.io/new-mac-setup). This could be a TIL, but often is not; the more accurate description is treating your blog as a "local cache" of stuff you always use, with exact instructions and copy pastable code that fits for you and is verified to work by you. The TAM is of course way smaller but this is how stuff like https://www.swyx.io/download-twitter-spaces ranks on Google immediately because of course there are way more people googling for the same things.

in short - try to identify the most useful parts of your experience and make it legible to others. your earnest and consistent effort elegantly answers "why should I read this" to the reader as well.

bemmu• 4 years ago

Writing about data seems reliably popular. There’s even a company that just writes viral blog posts for clients about their data (Pricenomics).

Whenever you run an experiment or gather data, consider whether it might be shareable as a post. It’s a win-win because people love learning the truth in numbers about a topic, and at the same time you get to have a chance at a decently popular post about your obscure thing.

Say you’re a toilet paper manufacturer. Probably nobody wants to read your company blog, but if you had a post with real data about how much TP is wasted by hotels not using rolls completely for example, that might just break through.

itqwertz• 4 years ago

Great advice!

You could write some articles about what you’ve done technically, make it SEO friendly, and get some Adsense money.

barbariangrunge• 4 years ago

I blog about what I’m learning about, plus an occasional short story or serialized piece of fiction

Eg, I’m studying two short stories every day to get better at writing short stories. As long as I’m studying them and taking all those notes, I may as well post those notes online.

Or, notes about more general topics, like “what is rhythm in prose?”

People studying other disciplines can easily do the same with what they’re learning. Once in a while it leads to some fun discussions with the people who stumble on your work

johnny_reilly• 4 years ago

I blog a lot of Today I Learned (TIL) because experience has taught me that tomorrow I forget. Writing it down makes it a little less likely I'll forget, and at least allows me to more easily remember when I do

Cupertino950142• 4 years ago

A long time ago, a Web pioneer told me, "The risk on the Internet is not that you'll be ripped off. It's that you'll be ignored."

These stories of blogs going viral and the authors becoming celebrities are like Lana Turner being discovered at Schwab's soda fountain (which turns out not to be true, http://www.playgroundtothestars.com/2013/06/schwabs-drug-sto...).

kixiQu2• 4 years ago

There are no stories of blogs going viral and the authors becoming celebrities in the linked post.

Cupertino950142• 4 years ago

One pedantipoint for you.

"These stories" -- I guess one could interpret that as an assertion that the stories are in the linked post. If you're looking for something to nitpick.

lawgimenez• 4 years ago

If you're not someone influential like the author, you could write something like a diary for your future self and for your kid to read in the future. And most importantly not be caught up with the analytics.

throwaway334701• 4 years ago

I usually write about things I really like. I agree with the mental trap that is only writing about new stuff.

layer8• 4 years ago

IMO this is backwards in term of goals and motivation. You should write a blog post if and when there’s something you want to write about. You shouldn’t start from wanting to have a blog but not actually having topics you’re passionate writing about.

II2II• 4 years ago

I think the advice fits fairly well with what you're saying: presumably a person works on projects they are passionate about and they learn about things they are interested in.

synergy20• 4 years ago

I hope blogs can be in the format of axios, a twitter in layers basically.

    summary
    more details
    even more details

Also wish blog has some minimal standard, like the date, author, how many words behind the title, it always made me a bit uneasy when there is no way to find out the date it's written.

audiodude• 4 years ago

It's also helpful for me to practice the polar opposite: morning pages. Where I write 750 words in the morning about just about anything, where I know it will be unpublished and remain private. It's kind of like journaling or keeping a diary, without the mental pressure of having it chronicle your day or make any sense.

I actually find that it's more valuable to just get thoughts and mental cruft out on a page in order to free up my creative brain, than to actually look back or reflect on anything I've written.

quadrifoliate• 4 years ago

An addition that most posts, including this would benefit from:

Be incredibly kind when judging other people for their projects. What goes around comes back around.

IMO a lot of the problem is not in finding things to blog about, but the fact that the Internet hive mind will casually toss off incredibly unkind criticism about your projects.

I remember https://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/ making the rounds almost ten years ago, and it played a big part in making me and many others nervous about exposing our projects to the world. The fact that there was any debate at all around whether or not the people criticizing that project uninvited was terrifying.

Of course, I have developed a thicker skin since then. And things are a lot better in 2022, and I imagine (or at least hope) that most people around here would not have such negative reactions to a hobbyist project. But it's good to remind ourselves every now and then.*

heavyset_go3• 4 years ago

I've experienced this when some of my personal projects made it on HN and Reddit. While they were 90% positive experiences, it was also a lesson in patience to refrain from correcting people who made drive-by criticisms and assumptions that were factually wrong, which they'd know if they had worked in the same domains the projects exist in or had read the READMEs.

Even then, those were good experiences, because it let me appreciate and discern between constructive criticism and criticism from those who don't really care and just want to complain on the internet.

im-a-baby• 4 years ago

People who hate on projects are those that have never attempted to create something on their own. It's kind of like how the easiest person to sell something to is a salesman. Most people's default reaction to anything is scepticism. People who have tried to create something on their own, and undoubtedly encountered other's scepticism, can skip the apprehensive stage and get to the meat of a project with an open mind.

zachthewf• 4 years ago

If only it were so simple. For a contradiction, just see the GP's link to harthur's blog. One of the critics is Steve Klabnik, who has definitely created things on his own.

Sometimes all sorts of people thoughtlessly act like jerks.

nolevels• 4 years ago

This should also be observed on HN. I have seen too many Show HN posts with no constructive criticism with the only comment deriding a technical choice / language.

bheadmaster• 4 years ago

Internet is a harsh place. But I think after some time one can get used to it.

I used to be (and probably still am to some degree) very sensitive of criticism, both online and in the real world. However, after spending a fair amount of time hanging out in some fairly unmoderated online communities, I think I've developed a somewhat stoic attitude towards any input I get.

In unmoderated online communities, people just say what's on their mind. And sometimes they say hurtful things, and you try to engage them in discussion of why they think so, because you can't stand the thought of someone thinking bad about you. Often they refuse to discuss anyway, and just insult you more instead, leading to endless frustration. After some time you just accept that some people aren't even interested in a discussion, and it's pointless to even try to engage them. They just want to insult for the sake of insulting, and their words and opinions are (should be) meaningless to you. The right way to handle them is to just ignore them. Don't cast pears before swine, and all that jazz.

bawolff• 4 years ago

While it is true that this is a thing that happens which can be very demotivating, for me i think the more demotivating thing is the idea that i'll do all this work writing stuff down, and nobody will care.

And unfortunately nobody caring is by far the most likely outcome.

I usually tell myself that my blog post is first and foremost for myself to better reflect and understand what i learned. That it is an end in itself and still worthwhile even if nobody reads it. Nonetheless i still find this the most demotivating part of keeping a blog.

pcurve• 4 years ago

Thanks OP!

I just made my first blog post!

https://pcurve.blogspot.com

I loved the "TIL" suggestion.

shayneoneill• 4 years ago

I worked at a company with a senior (Ex Amazon old dude with a PhD in com-sci and math) coder who every day would update an internal blog about the code he had written that day.

Although it was occasionally a bit difficult to search, it turned out to be amazing documentation for the code he was written. Just volumes of text about what was a fairly complicated subsystem involving machine learning and a bunch of stuff like that.

It gave an insight into the thinking process of someone with 30 years of experience solving some insanely complicated problems, but he insisted it was mostly for his own benefit to organize and clarify his thoughts about a giant project that was changing rapidly as business pressures piled on (The joys of startups).

I really ought do the same.

abhayhegde• 4 years ago

This seems like ideal form of journaling to the minute details. Thanks for sharing!

didgetmaster• 4 years ago

I have a project (general-purpose data management system called Didgets: https://www.didgets.com) and I also have a blog (https://didgets.substack.com) that is a mix of information about my project and also about my general thoughts on various data management issues.

Anytime you put your ideas or projects before the public, you run the risk of criticism and/or ridicule; but don't let that stop you. If your project can truly do some amazing things (like I think mine does), eventually it will attract some interest. Even if someone uses it just to try and prove you wrong, take that as a win.

samsquire• 4 years ago

I prefer reading someone's writeup than the code to implement the software product. With the write-up I can learn how the software works. The code is too hard to read to fit together the puzzle.

I read whitepapers to learn what others learned. I keep a list of whitepapers I am interested with on my GitHub profile.

I want people to spend lots of time writing what you did on GitHub to explain why your project is useful and how to use it. Some GitHub README.md are really good and explain the software well. Some libraries place documentation in the README.md

I journal computer software ideas and thoughts out in the open on GitHub. I am up to 700+ journal entries and they are in markdown and numbered paragraphs.

My interests are parallel computing, database internals, distributed systems, multithreading and scalability and futuristic software.

Links to my journal

https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas

https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas2

https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas4

guynamedloren3• 4 years ago

Fascinating! You are prolific, thanks for sharing.

antipaul• 4 years ago

… just don’t then try to make money off it.

There’s too much crap when I search for actual high quality content due to SEO and stuff.

(I’m not saying don’t blog. Definitely, it’s as useful as described in this post, and we’re not running out of storage space.)

est• 4 years ago

I categorize my blog as follows:

- stdin: stuff I've learned from elsewhere

- stdout: concrete, objective stuff. Most of which are coding problems

- stderr: my ramblings about the world, opinions.

gbrown_• 4 years ago

An idiosyncrasy I have about TIL posts is that I think they should focus on what you were able to got done/progress with.

TIL posts that truly have been learned that day, or recently, often contain subtle errors explicitly or implicitly. Which isn’t a problem in and of itself but in a when such posts get used as the basis of someone else’s TIL post these errors often get compounded.

As an example I find almost any TIL style post about a text editor to be like this. To give a contrast Chris Siebenmann‘s blog [1] does give focus to what was done. Also the author is reasonably good about making corrections in edits or follow up posts.

[1] https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/

flyingsky• 4 years ago

This blogpost by a self-taught engineer at Uber gives a framework for deciding what to blog about that I really resonate with. "As a rule of thumb, any topic that passes any of the following litmus tests is a good candidate for a blog post or conference talk: 1. The most senior engineer you know would find the information and subject matter compelling. 2. People who read the post think: “Wow, I can’t believe they managed to <something really hard or difficult to figure out>. I really wish we had someone like that who could help us with <thorny problem>”. 3. The subject matter is deep in a way that readers are unlikely to be able to obtain the same information anywhere else." https://medium.com/swlh/from-coding-bootcamp-graduate-to-bui...

alin23• 4 years ago

Also please write about your process of writing. I just did here: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog...

And while I’m not sure it would be of any use to someone, I know I wished I could read how others make their writing process more convenient when I started.

There are so many ways to publish writings that one could get overwhelmed with choices and not even start. For some people it feels good to have some guidance, and let someone with experience make some of the choices for you.

What to blog about

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