Advice for new tech bloggers

Expert tech bloggers share their tips for writers who are just getting started

We interviewed a dozen(ish) expert tech bloggers over the past year to share perspectives and tips beyond Writing for Developers. The idea: ask everyone the same set of questions and hopefully see an interesting range of responses emerge. They did.

You can read all the interviews here. We’ll continue the interview series (and maybe publish some book spinoff posts too). But first, we want to pause and compare how the first cohort of interviewees responded to specific questions.

Here’s how everyone answered the question “Your advice for people just getting started with blogging?”

Preston Thorpe

It’s often intimidating to start writing. At first, you will definitely feel like you are writing to no audience. But writing about a specific project you’re working on, or problem you encountered, with a topic you are particularly passionate about — those always tend to be the most enjoyable for others. Even if your posts don’t get a bunch of viral attention, we have all been hunting for unique information and came across someone’s super helpful blog posts about the exact niche subject... Those types of blogs are equally as great and useful as ones which end up getting on the front page of HN.

Sam Rose

In the beginning, don’t think about it too hard. Get something written, on a regular basis, to start developing those muscles. There is a very good chance nobody will read it to begin with, but that’s fine. Write for yourself.

When you’re feeling more confident in your writing, start asking for feedback. Friends are a good start but they can be a double-edged sword. They love you, they want to encourage you, they are less likely to say you’ve made something that sucks. Reach out to writers more established than yourself, writing about similar things, and ask nicely if they’d give you feedback. You’d be surprised how many are happy to do this.

After a few pieces with feedback from other writers, you might start to notice you have your own style of writing. If you can’t see it, dedicate some time to reading other tech writers. Study every word. How do they make use of punctuation, sentences, paragraphs? Is their tone formal or casual? Do they have any favourite words or phrases? Do they write as themselves or have they created a character? Your own style will become more clear as you start to pay attention to the styles of others.

You’ll then have a decision to make: lean into your style, or change it. If you read my older posts (e.g. anything pre-2013) and my newer ones (2018 onwards) you will notice the style has changed a lot. I did this because sprinkling smileys and pop culture references into my posts wasn’t helping the reader learn, and was quite frankly a bit cringe.

My writing today is more… clinical. I remove all words not pulling their weight, I avoid all jargon, and I try to stick to short sentence lengths. It can be constricting, and a bit less fun, but I think it makes for a better end result.

Tanel Poder

Getting started: When writing your first blog entries, document your story. I mean the technical sequence of your actions. How you did something when addressing a real situation, even if there are plenty of similar articles out there. Such personal documentation will be useful as a future reference for yourself (speaking from experience), and sometimes for others too. Unless your goal is to become a random influencer with the most followers, but no substance, do not use AI to write your content.

Medium term: Start adding context of why you chose to do something like you did, given your circumstances and requirements. This is not just “rehashing documentation” that the AI chatbots these days can do very well. The “why” of tradeoffs is a deeper level of understanding that shows both your expertise in the field and helps others understand it better as well.

Long term: Address something unique. A problem that you fixed that didn’t have well-known solutions documented before. Or if you found yourself doing repetitive work and ended up semi-automating it with a simple tool or even just a one-liner script, that’s unique enough to publish!

Gunnar Morling

First, as mentioned before, don’t be afraid of writing about things that might seem not interesting or novel enough. If there’s something which you found interesting, chances are somebody else will find it interesting, too.

Then, and that might be a bit controversial, I’d recommend starting on your own domain from the get go, rather than on a shared place like medium.com. While it can be a bit more hassle to set that up initially, it will help you a lot to build your own, independent brand, and it just creates a more professional perception. It also means you are in control of things, nobody can change how your posts can be accessed, etc. As far as tooling is concerned, I’m a big proponent of static site generators (I am using Hugo for my own blog, published via GitHub Pages). They give me the biggest freedom in terms of layout and formatting and I like the workflow of writing blog posts in source formats such as AsciiDoc and storing them in git. But then, others prefer tools like WordPress with a more WYSIWYG-like experience, so you should try out what suits you best.

Lastly, be patient. Blogging is a long game, you shouldn’t be depressed when not getting too many readers or comments initially. It takes years to build up an audience, and on the way there, it can sometimes feel a bit like shouting into the void. It’s about building up a corpus of interesting posts over a longer period of time. Success will come eventually, and later on it can be very rewarding to see how posts from years ago are still regularly receiving comments or are referenced from other places.

Charity Majors

The advice I will give is the advice I find nearly impossible to take: Keep it short, keep it snappy. Edit twice as much as you write. Short, pithy posts tend to be more memorable, get wider traction, and stick in people’s minds more; they’re also faster and easier to ship. Do NOT write 5000-8000 word monstrosities, like I seem to be unable to keep doing (sigh).

I have a sticky note next to my monitor that reminds me of this, and one of these days, I swear I’m going to try taking my own advice!

Also: I find Twitter or Bluesky threads to be an incredibly effective form of drafting blog posts. It slows you down just enough that you have to think about how to make your point with some pith and punch. It prevents you from being too wordy. I like to go for a walk and draft a thread while I’m getting from point A to point B.

Eric Lippert

People getting started often have many complementary goals: practicing their writing skills, educating users, building an audience and a personal brand. Something that helps with all of these things is frequency. When I started, I was doing many relatively short posts a week. Keeping the cadence high for the first couple years really helped me practice my short-form writing and build an audience. Don’t obsess over wordsmithing the perfect article. Get it out, and you’ll improve as you go.

Aaron Francis

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.

fasterthanlime

I’ve read “write what you wish you could read” a bunch as advice and I think I generally agree with it? It can be hard to get that initial set of eyes to look at your stuff, so maybe try finding a community, a group of people who can give you legitimate feedback. It’s going to be hard to find people who are willing to give honest feedback (less so in Europe), but it’s important.

Me, I’m my own worst critic, but I keep having to remind myself that blog articles are not like software projects. I’m not going to have to keep maintaining articles forever — I spend a finite amount of time on them, do my best, and if I feel like revisiting the topic later, I can do that! Obsessing forever has an opportunity cost: while you’re trying to perfect that one piece, there are so many others you’re not writing. It can be hard to find a balance: setting deadlines for yourself helps — sometimes.

Phil Eaton

So many lessons, so many suggestions, because I hear so many different reasons people have for not writing or writing but not completing and publishing. However, to summarize it all I would stress that when you speak humbly and in good faith, the internet is incredibly helpful and forgiving, whether you’re an expert or not. So the stakes are just so low and the potential benefits to yourself and others are so great.

And in terms of what to write about, I think you should 1) write about whatever you feel like writing because the first big challenge is your own motivation and 2) focus on what is confusing to you!

Lastly, writing blog posts doesn’t need to be a public thing! It’s immensely useful to you and your team if you publish internal blog posts that the public will never see. If you can publish publicly, that is nice for you and the company. But don’t be under the impression that if your company is particularly secretive, you can’t participate in all the value blogging brings.

Glauber Costa

Number one, just do it! But also, keep it short and to the point, focusing on just one thing.

Sometimes your team might try to pressure you into including all sorts of interesting details that are related to that topic. I never liked this approach, and my blogs became a lot more successful when I stopped trying to squeeze in details that weren’t critical to what I was trying to convey.

It’s natural for you to want to tell the whole story, but having a clear focus is important for keeping the reader interested. If you dump everything into the blog post, readers won’t discover the highlights. Nobody cares about you. Really! People have very little time. Just cover the key points, and know that people will seek you out – maybe engage on social media – if they want more details.

So, keep it short, keep it simple, keep it to the point. Find one thing that’s going to be memorable, and focus the article on that. The rest doesn’t matter. Resist the temptation to write everything that’s on your mind.

Matt Butcher

Use the blog as a log for what you are learning. Early on, I wrote about sed because that’s what I was learning. Not too long ago, I wrote a post summarizing what I have learned about software dev. While it may seem less evident, that, too, was an account of something I had learned about myself. For twenty years, I’ve been “learning in public.” And for all that time, I’ve been steadily reading other people’s blogs as they do the same. I think that’s the most helpful view of blogging both as a reader and as a writer: Blogging is a unique way of sharing knowledge “in real time” as we learn.

Thorsten Ball

Anything goes. You can make your blog your own thing. Every post has a single paragraph? Go for it. Every post is super long and you only publish every two months? Sweet, do it.

Don’t worry about “someone else already wrote about it”. The Internet’s a big place and not every bit of writing resonates with everyone. Think of it like this: how many different explanations on the same topic did you have to read until it “clicked”? Depending on the topic, it can be a lot. Because every teacher, every writer — they all have different lives, different point of views, different ways of thinking about things, different metaphors they use, different phrases. And some of it resonates with some people but not with others. You can be another unique combination of experience and point of view and skill and put something out there that resonates with someone.

Send it. Don’t be a perfectionist.

Write about things you know. Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. It’s bad writing and people can sniff it out.

Cool it with the memes and AI-generated images.

Jeff Atwood

Just write. Make a habit of writing. It’s like exercise. It’s like anything else…mental health. What are the fundamentals of mental health? Are you eating? Are you sleeping? Are you exercising? Are you having sane interactions with friends and family? These are the fundamentals. And I would add another fundamental to that: Are you writing? Are you formulating a story of why the things that are happening to you are happening to you, and what you can do about that, and what it means? That’s an important part of the formula.

A lot of stuff just randomly happens. But a lot of stuff happens because we chose our own adventure, we chose a certain path, we made a choice. And if you write about that – I made this choice, and it was a good choice, or it was a bad choice, and I learned all these things – you’re not just helping yourself, you’re helping so many other people behind you.

So write regularly, pick a writing schedule that you can live with, and treat it like an exercise regimen. Your blog posts don’t all have to be perfect. Don’t worry; don’t think, “Oh, I can’t write because it’s embarrassing or it’ll be bad.” Everybody’s bad at some level. But you know how you get better? By doing it regularly – not necessarily every day, but on a schedule. That’s how you get better at stuff. That’s how you practice and learn – by doing something regularly, ideally, with feedback.

It’s a lot like my advice to people who are single. How are you going to get into a relationship if you don’t leave the house (before Tinder, at least)? Step one, leave the house. Go to places where other people are present and meet people. Applying that here, just pick some form of writing that works for you, and do it. But I will say, please go beyond chat. Chat is more of an ideation tool. I’m a true believer in writing. Writing is so core. Pick a writing schedule and stick to it.

antirez

Don’t lose too much time in setting up the perfect blog environment. Just write about things that in a given moment you care about. Don’t force yourself to find topics.