[HN Gopher] What to blog about
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What to blog about
Author : Tomte
Score : 122 points
Date : 2022-11-06 17:57 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (simonwillison.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (simonwillison.net)
| ok_dad wrote:
| 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| article notifies the reader it might be out of date.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| and I find it's incredibly out of date and not I should be doing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.
| simonw wrote:
| 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/
| xrd wrote:
| 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...
| twic wrote:
| > 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.
| hexis wrote:
| 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.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| > 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.
| fm2606 wrote:
| 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.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| 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]".
| fm2606 wrote:
| Thank you! One would think with as much education as I've
| had and amount I've read that my spelling would be a bit
| better, but, here we are!
|
| My smart-ass comment would be "I knew that and just wanted
| to see if someone would catch it!"
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| 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).
| csydas wrote:
| 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.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| 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
| resume spam maybe? Those are still awful to wade through on
| search see l results.
| mcbishop wrote:
| 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).
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Precisely, I get the sentiment/frustration expressed in the
| parent comment, but this is a curation, discoverability
| issue.
| twelve40 wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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."
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| 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.
| philzook wrote:
| 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.
| mminer237 wrote:
| 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.
| baxtr wrote:
| 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.
| uncleshelby wrote:
| 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.
| cpach wrote:
| 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.
| CM30 wrote:
| 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.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| 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.
| 1121redblackgo wrote:
| skookum!
| markx2 wrote:
| > 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.
| simonw wrote:
| I'd add a third step. "Make cool Shit, put it on the internet,
| then write something about it."
| [deleted]
| flashgordon wrote:
| 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!
| swyx wrote:
| 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.
| r4v3n wrote:
| 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.
| itqwertz wrote:
| Great advice!
|
| You could write some articles about what you've done technically,
| make it SEO friendly, and get some Adsense money.
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| 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
| guynamedloren wrote:
| 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.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| 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!
| philzook wrote:
| 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.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| 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.
| examplary_cable wrote:
| 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.
| boyter wrote:
| 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.
| 32gbsd wrote:
| This is good. I always encourage output vs constant consumption.
| bachmeier wrote:
| 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.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| 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
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