Bryan Cantrill (and Friends!) on Blogging
Revisiting the recent Oxide and Friends "Technical Blogging" episode with Bryan + Tim Bray, Will Snow and Adam Leventhal
“Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. We need to do a better job of telling the world…Blogging is a good way to do this.” – Tim Bray, 2004
The recent Oxide and Friends episode on Technical Blogging was anchored in storied beginnings:
A legacy of blogging that began at Sun Microsystems and continues to inspire technologists today
Bryan Cantrill’s fantastic foreword for our new book on technical blogging
Bryan’s blog post on blogging, which was the first post published on his new Oxide-server-hosted blog site
The impetus for the Technical Blogging episode was me asking Bryan some questions about his blogging: how he got started, why he continues, the most surprising impact, and so on.
That got Bryan thinking (and writing) about his blogging journey. In true Bryan collaborative fashion, he instantly assembled an impressive panel for an open discussion:
Tim Bray, whose blogging leadership at Sun sparked a movement
Will Snow, who personally built the infrastructure supporting that Sun blogging movement
Adam Leventhal, one of the most impressive technologists to take that movement forward – and also Bryan’s longtime co-conspirator in all things from DTrace to Oxide and Beastie Boys Book tours (more on that later)
And he kindly invited Piotr Sarna and I to join them.
Some prehistory
Since Bryan’s personal blogging journey began with Some prehistory, let’s start this article with some prehistory related to tech blogging.
Until the early 2000s, it was unthinkable for engineers at tech leaders like Sun Microsystems and Microsoft to openly share their ideas with the world. As Bryan put it: “The dogma held that the company must always speak with one voice, and always in very conventional terms, about how wonderful and great everything was.” An engineer publishing unsanctioned musings was, in most cases, a firing offense.
But beyond the walls of these companies, tech blogging was taking off. Building upon the foundation set by Dave Winer in 1994 and boosted by the release of blogging platforms, the early 2000s saw the rise of now-famous indie tech blogs – for example, those by Tim Bray and Jeff Atwood. In 2003 Microsoft, led by Robert Scoble, encouraged its employees share authentic voices and perspectives via blogging. As Eric Lippert (the technical editor for our book) recently shared, this move aimed to dispel the myth that Microsoft was impersonal, secretive, uncommunicative, and uncaring. It gave rise to popular Microsoft-focused tech blogs such as those by Eric and Scott Hanselman. And Sun Microsystems took notice.
In 2004, Sun’s John Fowler (Software CTO at the time) had a vision for blogging at Sun, a vision that would ultimately set a whole solar system of tech blogging into orbit. In what turned out to be a brilliant move, he put the initiative in the hands of Tim Bray, who was already well-known for blogging (as well as humble accomplishments like co-creating XML).
Blogging at Sun
As Tim shared early on in the podcast, “Blogs were social media back then. Clueful technology companies realized that there was something to be accomplished by starting a conversation with the world that included your customers.”
A tech giant like Sun giving its technologists free rein to initiate conversations with the world was a massive shift, both for the company and the would-be-bloggers. How do you move from a carefully controlled world of PR/Marketing-driven messaging to allowing any employee to share their unfiltered “in the trenches” experiences with the world?
Policy + infrastructure
In May 2004, Tim crafted a lightweight policy encouraging and empowering technologists to speak directly to the world. 838 words total, with a little absolvement, lots of solid advice, and zero legalese.
A few nuggets:
“The real goal isn’t to get everyone at Sun blogging, it’s to become part of the industry conversation. So, whether or not you’re going to write, and especially if you are, look around and do some reading, so you learn where the conversation is and what people are saying.”
“If you’re writing about a product that a lot of people are using, or are waiting for, and you know what you’re talking about, you’re probably going to be interesting. And because of the magic of hyperlinking and the Web, if you’re interesting, you’re going to be popular, at least among the people who understand your specialty.”
“The best way to be interesting, stay out of trouble, and have fun is to write about what you know. If you have a deep understanding of some chunk of Solaris or a hot JSR, it’s hard to get into too much trouble, or be boring, talking about the issues and challenges around that. On the other hand, a Solaris architect who publishes rants on marketing strategy, or whether Java should be open-sourced, has a good chance of being embarrassed by a real expert, or of being boring.”
Tim negotiated his way around a few onerous requests (like Legal wanting blog authors to get explicit approval for every hyperlink they added), and the policy was ultimately approved and announced in a matter of days.
As Tim was finalizing the policy, Will Snow volunteered to stand up the infrastructure. Will took on this task as a “fun experiment.” With Roller running on Sun machines, he quickly got blogs.sun.com up and running. However, as the number of bloggers and readers grew, it became clear they had underestimated demand. As Will shared, “It scaled up so fast, it was spooky – to the point where I was driving machines up to our data center and putting them in myself.”
Side note: Here’s some outside perspective from a 2004 Computerworld article, “Sun blogs show uncensored public face.”
The impact
With the winning formula of policy + infrastructure + eager engineers, blogs.sun.com took off. In just 6 months from the launch, more than 1000 Sun technologists were blogging – engaging directly with the public, almost entirely without incident. (Exception: someone once published a mathematical model predicting the Sun stock price, but that was controlled with a quick phone call).
This perfect storm didn’t just spark an impressive wave of tech blogging at Sun in the early 2000s. It caused a butterfly effect: for example, Bryan drawing Adam into blogging, and both of them inspiring waves of technologists to start blogging over the decades to come.
Here’s Tim’s take on why the initiative became such an instant success: “In the profession, there was obviously a hunger for human voices in conversation, the kind of thing that no PR department would ever go for. And since we have a highly technical profession that's full of our own jargon, you needed people who could actually explain what the company was doing using that jargon. You just can't talk about DTrace or Application Server technology or your open source projects without using a lot of words that no PR person would understand. This initiative freed people to have conversations in their natural tone of voice, using the vocabulary they would normally use. How could people not like that? Not just the people who got to publish, but also the customers who wanted to figure out what their vendors were really doing (not what the PR people said). It was like a vast unfilled hole in the ecosystem.”
Side note: Read Tim’s perspective three years after the launch of blogs.sun.com.
Two decades later, have new media like short-form video and microblogging diminished the importance of long-form blogging? Not according to this group. Tim explained, “One of the things that the 20th and 21st centuries have taught us is that new media do not really displace old media. Radio didn't kill books, and TV didn't kill radio, and movies didn't kill TV, and so on. Blogging is just a subset of social media right now, but it's still powerful. And in our profession – and in politics and to some extent in finance – a lot of the really serious needle-moving discourse happens on blogs. Just because we have an interesting history, it doesn't mean we don't have an interesting future. Let's not make this into a museum tour.”
How do we, as a profession, lead long-form blogging into an interesting future?
“You’re not writing enough”
Cue in the mantra from Bryan’s masterful foreword to our book on technical blogging:
“You’re not writing enough.”
Okay, a little more context:
To continue serving our collective craft, collaborating with our fellow practitioners, and bridging to future generations, we all need to write more.
But why aren’t we writing enough? One of the main reasons: writing can be challenging. Sometimes the very idea of sharing your thoughts with the world is terrifying (Sarna shared his personal “Stockholm Syndrome” story in both the podcast and the book). Sometimes the act of writing is difficult, for a broad spectrum of reasons ranging from deep technical complexity (e.g., Adam’s AWS Outposts post and 6-part APFS series) to deep emotional connection (e.g., the evocative post that Bryan and Steve Tuck recently wrote on Charles Beeler’s passing – warning: have tissues handy). And sometimes the difficulty follows the act of writing, particularly if you take on a contentious topic.
There’s also the often paralyzing fear of “What if it’s not good enough?” And the higher the stakes, the higher the expectations. For example, years later, Adam is still disappointed that the Transposit launch post fell short of his expectations (note: dealing with multiple stakeholders makes things exceptionally challenging!). But a published blog that didn’t turn out exactly as you had envisioned will inevitably have a much greater impact than a blog that remains buried in a Drafts folder somewhere.
Remember, blog posts (at least those published on your own site) are easily editable and even retractable. Adam has retracted a blog post after rethinking its technical merit. Your work doesn’t need to be perfect, especially at first. As Adam put it, “You start, you do it more, and then you get better. I tell this to my kids often. That’s a normal process.”
Let’s close with a quick recap of some high-level tips for getting better at blogging (Shameless promo: see the Writing for Developers book for lots of practical tips and examples):
Choose a compelling topic. Things that you’re personally Proud of, Pained by, or otherwise Passionate about (think: the ‘3 Ps’) are great candidates. Paraphrasing the seminal Sun blogging policy: if you write about what you’re intensely interested in, it will most likely resonate with others and be interesting for others to read.
Consider your audience. Think about who you’re writing for, what they already know, what they don’t yet know, what they’re most curious about, where they might call BS, and so on. It’s fine to start with just a brain dump. But before you publish, make sure it’s well-tailored for your anticipated reader.
Be yourself. Speak from the heart and don’t mask your true personality in an attempt to sound “more professional.” Write in an authentic voice, whatever that means for you – be it dramatically enunciated sentences with em dashes marking breath marks (Bryan), subtle deadpan (Sarna), or something else entirely. If your writing sounds anything like ChatGPT, you’re doing it wrong.
While generative AI chatbots aren’t (yet?) great at writing interesting and authentic prose, they’re surprisingly capable when it comes to reviewing your written work. Although the exact verbiage of its suggestions is often a bit…off…you can often glean useful perspective by taking a step back and looking at the spirit of its suggestions. Keep this in mind the next time your review request is met with human sighing and/or eye rolling.
And a parting tech tip from Bryan: use a static site generator! For more on why and how, read Bryan’s Blogging through the decades post, which introduces his freshly migrated blog. (Farewell circa 2010 WordPress lifeboat; hello Hugo-based blog running on an Oxide rack!)
Delightful detours
We’d be remiss to overlook a few discussion threads that were rather loosely related to the topic of technical blogging – but still tremendously fun to listen in on. Summarizing can’t do them justice, so we’ll just direct you to the appropriate timestamps from the podcast.
The Beastie Boys Book tour and the inception of Oxide [40:50]
The great em dash debate – and ellipses too… [1:02:22]
Bryan’s “airing of grievances” regarding a New Yorker cartoon caption contest [1:10:27]
Reading great writing
If you’ve read this far, surely you’re up for even more reading? Start with Bryan’s Blogging through the decades and beware that the seemingly reasonable length (~1600 words) is quite deceiving. Prepare to spend hours binge-reading across the web of his online oeuvre. Then head over to the great reading list that the Oxide and Friends team compiled, capturing all the references and recommendations shared across the live audio as well as the lively chat. Also, see the list of posts we mentioned in our book.
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Stay tuned for more tech blogger spotlights. Coming up: Jeff Atwood, Sam Rose, Phil Eaton, Scott Hanselman, Matt Butcher, Glauber Costa, Amos Wenger, Charity Majors, Gunnar Morling, Dan Luu… These will be mixed in with the monthly writethat.blog updates.
