antirez (Salvatore Sanfilippo) on Technical Blogging
Redis' creator on why blogging is fundamental for successful projects, his writing process, and AI in writing
Welcome to our latest attempt to not-so-gently nudge you to write more! Following up on writethat.blog and Writing for Developers: Blogs That Get Read, we’re sharing the perspectives of expert tech bloggers: why they write, how they tackle writing challenges, and their lessons learned. This time, let’s hear from antirez (Salvatore Sanfilippo).
You probably know antirez as the author of Redis and heard of his recent return to the Redis community. What you might not know is that he also writes popular sci-fi novels (e.g., WOHPE). He’s been blogging extensively for 20+ years and thought quite a bit about the relationship between programming and writing.
Over to antirez…
Why did you start blogging – and why do you continue?
I don't know exactly, but in general, I want to express my interest in things I like, in my passions. It was not some kind of calculation where I said: oh, well, blogging would benefit my career. I just needed to do it.
What has been the most surprising impact of blogging for you?
That it is a fundamental carrier for software projects. You can't have a successful project most of the time without communicating it. Sometimes it happens that developers who don't communicate do things that are so important that other folks will communicate them, and the projects will still be successful. But in general, I believe that communicating, for developers, is a key asset for their projects, startups, whatever, to have any chance to become popular.
What blog post are you most proud of and why?
Probably these two could have been research papers:
2. http://antirez.com/news/124
What post was the most difficult to write and how did you tackle it?
I can't point to a specific blog post since I wrote many blog posts that were technical and, in theory, difficult to tackle, so I would like to, instead, show what is the process that I follow to write blog posts. Basically, the writing is a by-product of the interest I have at a given moment about some specific topic. So I'm working at something, and I have all those ideas floating. Eventually, all these ideas start to make sense in a more coherent thought, and at this point, I want to write about it: I just write a list of items I want to cover in the blog post, which together form a coherent reasoning about a given topic. Then I develop each item in the list.
Any lessons learned that you want to share with the community?
Try to write posts that are both information-dense AND entertaining. Refuse the magazine-style layout, with posts starting like "When in 1955 Mary Smith started to work at XYZ, she could never have thought that ABC was so 123." Blogging must be the other possibility of writing, a more honest one.
Your advice for people just getting started with blogging?
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.
A few blogs that you particularly enjoy reading?
I really used to love Joel on Software and Paul Graham’s writing. Recently, I appreciated Karpathy writing about AI: https://karpathy.github.io/
I like this cryptography-related blog: https://words.filippo.io/
And a few more that from time to time are featured on Hacker News. But all in all, probably right now, most people that would be able to deliver great written-form content are producing YouTube videos or similar. There was definitely a huge shift in recent times.
Anything else you want to add?
I just want to discourage anybody starting a blog from using AI to write content. I'm very AI-positive; I believe it's a true, wonderful revolution. But blog posts must not be "generated" content, even in the sense of humans trying to write as much as possible. They must *distill* human experience. Compress one month of thinking hard about a topic in a few paragraphs. So of course, let LLMs fix your grammar and spot your errors, but let's write the most condensed and information-dense stuff. Now it is more important than ever.
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Stay tuned for more tech blogger spotlights. Coming up: Jeff Atwood, Bryan Cantrill, Sam Rose, Phil Eaton, Scott Hanselman, Matt Butcher, Glauber Costa, Charity Majors, Gunnar Morling, Dan Luu… These will be mixed in with the monthly writethat.blog updates.
