Aaron Francis on Technical Blogging

“What a cheat code it is to have a public body of work that people can just passively stumble upon”

Given that you’re not writing enough, we’re following up on our book and writethat.blog by interviewing expert tech bloggers: why they write, how they tackle writing challenges, and their lessons learned. This time, we (finally!) caught up with Aaron Francis.

For years, Aaron has been inspiring people to try hard: to push yourself beyond your comfort zone, give it your all, and share what you learned. From blogging to screencasting, his work strikes a rare balance – high information density, but also approachable, personable, and memorable. Also, you can’t describe Aaron without using the phrase “just the nicest guy.”

Over to Aaron…

Why did you start blogging – and why do you continue?

I started blogging as a way to get attention for a product that I was working on. And while that product never really worked out, I started getting interest from people that wanted me to come work for them, either as a freelancer or as a full-time employee. And since then, I have realized what a cheat code it is to have a public body of work that people can just passively stumble upon. It's like having a bunch of people out there advocating for you at all times, even while you're sleeping.

What has been the most surprising impact of blogging for you?

I got an email just the other day about one of the blogs that I wrote. The email said that I had changed this person's life from one of the posts that I wrote. The post was called "What if you try hard?" and it was basically a call for people to go above and beyond and do more than just the minimum.

This person said that they took that advice to heart and started submitting conference talks and doing open source work – and then, because of that, landed a dream job that they never thought possible. That was probably the most impactful thing that I've ever heard from any of my work.

What blog post are you most proud of and why?

The one I'm most proud of is called Publishing Your Work Increases Your Luck. That's kind of the one that launched me onto the scene. It was published on GitHub's ReadMe, and it sat at the top of Hacker News for like 24 hours.

I've since turned that into a couple of different conference talks and a couple of videos. It really surprised me how much that post resonated with people.

I'm really proud of it because I have had a lot of people reach out to me and tell me how much of an impact it made on them and how much it encouraged them to start putting themselves out there.

It was the turning point in my developer career, but also in my writing career.

What post was the most difficult to write and how did you tackle it?

I think the one that was probably hardest for me to write was my 2024 year in review because 2024 was a very difficult year for me!

I tackled it by just being honest and transparent and not shying away from the hardships, but also trying to create a hopeful forward-looking tone and be an encouragement to people who have also had hard years.

That's something that I always try to communicate in my writing: the sense of hope. Whether things are going well or things are going terribly, I'm always trying to encourage people and, honestly, trying to encourage myself. I do a lot of this writing for myself and oftentimes the things that I need to hear most end up resonating the most with the public.

Any lessons learned that you want to share with the community?

The most important thing is that you press publish. It's better to publish 12 blog posts a year than spend a year fretting over a single post. You'll get better as you go and you'll get better as you publish.

Your advice for people just getting started with blogging?

If you publish your posts, then you get to count that as a success. The finish line is pressing publish. It doesn't matter if it bombs or it does super well. Your job is to publish it. That's when you get to say, "I did a good job."

Of course, you can learn from feedback. You can learn from the ones that did well, and you can learn from the ones that did poorly. But internally, I think you need to reframe the finish line as putting it out into the world, not putting it out into the world and having it be a success.

A few blogs that you particularly enjoy?

Jason Cohen does a lot of good writing about business and SaaS. The Crunchy Data blog has a lot of good Postgres content.

Anything else you want to add?

Putting yourself out there is terrifying, which is why most people don't do it. That means that if you do put yourself out there and you do start publishing your work, you're already ahead of 98% of other people.