Why bother with a blog?
Every software developer has a blog these days, so why bother? What value would mine bring?
The original idea came indirectly from my other half, Matt. About a month and a half ago he started writing a diary and it seems he’s really got into it! Every evening he gets into bed, opens his diary, and writes a page or two (depending on how exciting the day was). As he says himself, it’s usually not anything particularly ‘thrilling’; it’s usually just a short entry about what he did, various thoughts he’s had, and occasionally some progress entries on our house renovation 1. It may sound a bit strange to say, but I’ve really enjoyed watching him do it. It seems like such a cathartic experience and having that daily ritual seems, in itself, therapeutic.
For a software engineer, the natural alternative to writing a diary is a blog. I’ve read countless technical blog posts (usually via Hacker News) from various great developers and I’ve always flirted with the idea of starting one myself.
What’s stopped me, thus far, is that I’ve always thought the market to be ‘saturated’. Even more, I know that there’s so many bloggers out there who do a far better job than I ever could! The chances are that barely anybody is ever going to read this (hi Matt!). Plus, the content is never going to be as polished as top-ranking articles on Hacker News.
But I’ve since come to realise that this is okay! As Matt says about his journalling “I write it because I enjoy it … “, and that’s how I’m going to approach this. The greatest value in writing this blog should be for me, not anyone else (though if it does bring value to anyone else, great - it probably wasn’t my intention!).
So in terms of value it will bring to me, I’m hoping for three things:
- To reinforce my knowledge of things. I usually find that writing as if I’m a technical expert in it (even though I’m definitely not) helps to consolidate things.
- To exercise my writing skills. I’ve not really written anything non-technical longer than a text in a very long time.
- To give me something to look back on in the future as a “oh yeah, I remember doing that!”.
And with that, let’s get writing some proper blog entries!
As a complete side note, the original title for this post was going to be ‘why bother?’. Thankfully2, I have GitHub Copilot active in my editor and the very first auto-complete suggestion it gave me was
Why bother? Why bother with anything? Why bother with life
That immediately prompted a title change.