Charity Majors on Technical Blogging

“There are very few things in life that I am prouder of than the body of writing I have developed over the past 10 years.”

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. Today, we’re featuring Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.

In case you’re somehow not familiar with Charity, here are two things you should know. One, she boldly goes where others fear to tread – in writing, engineering, leadership, and likely everything she tackles. Two, it’s brilliant on all counts (and in every sense of the word).

Charity publishes blog posts that get the community talking (and thinking… and rethinking) at charity.wtf. We were dying to hear her thoughts on blogging, and she generously agreed to share!

Over to Charity…

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

I started writing at a big life inflection point -- the brief period after I left Facebook but before I started Honeycomb. I had started giving talks, and found it surprisingly rewarding, but I'm not an extrovert and I've always considered myself more of a writer-thinker than a talker-thinker, so I thought I might as well give it a try.

There are very few things in life that I am prouder of than the body of writing I have developed over the past 10 years. I have had a yearly goal of publishing about one longform piece of writing per month. I don't think I've ever actually hit that goal, but some years I have come close! When I look back over things I have written, I feel like I can see myself growing up, my mental health improving, I'm getting better at taking the long view, being more empathetic, being less reactive... I've never graduated from anything in my life, so to me, my writing kind of externalizes the progress I've made as a human being. It's meaningful to me.

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

Writing forces you to hold your beliefs up to the light of day and examine them for inconsistencies, lack of evidence, shoddy logic, or even just non-compelling arguments. I was just realizing recently how much my writing has shaped my convictions, at least as much as my convictions have shaped my writing.

What blog post are you most proud of and why? What post was the most difficult to write and how did you tackle it?

My most recent post, "Corporate 'DEI' Is An Imperfect Vehicle For Deeply Meaningful Ideals" was unbelievably difficult to write, for several reasons. It's not an area where I've written a lot, or where I have a lot of expertise. I've definitely experienced the pile-on from social media when I've gotten things wrong in the past, and that can be quite painful. Most importantly, I felt a responsibility to get it right. A lot of people are reeling right now from attacks on every front, and I did not want to contribute to that pain or take it lightly. At the same time, I wanted to be honest about some of the ways that I feel like DEI has missed the mark in the past, and some of the lessons we need to carry forward with us into the future.

The material started off as a purely internal concern for Honeycomb. I started working on it back in December, when Christine [Yen] and I were preparing for our yearly company offsite. I wrote maybe 10,000 words that will never see the light of day, as a way of wrestling with my own beliefs and working through questions like, "what do I believe?", "what have I witnessed, what have I experienced?", "what really does contribute to a culture of growth and excellence?"

After the offsite, I was left with this lingering feeling of not being quite done with it yet. It feels like very few people are speaking up for DEI right now, and I wanted to be one of them. But when I sit and try to tally up the number of hours that went into writing the post itself ... I counted up at least 35 hours of writing, editing, and drafting, all of which came AFTER the two months of working on this nearly every day. I don't want to think about how much time went into it overall -- my ADHD time blindness might be a blessing, in this case! But it was worth it and I would do it again.

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

It's impossible to predict what is going to resonate with folks, let alone "go viral," so please don't try. Not only is it impossible, but you can smell it when people are trying too hard, and it's unbelievably offputting. Pull on the threads of whatever is deeply interesting to you, and try to put something out there regularly. If it's interesting to you, it's going to be interesting to someone else.

Your advice for people just getting started with blogging?

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.

Anything else you want to add?

People always go on and on about the benefits of speaking at conferences -- and they're real -- but writing reaches more people, and lasts longer. My biggest pro tip -- any talk you write, you should also turn into an essay, and any essay you write, you should also submit as a talk. You've already done a ton of the work, it's an easy way to wring more value out of it!

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Stay tuned for more tech blogger spotlights. Coming up: Scott Hanselman, Gunnar Morling, Phil Eaton, Matt Butcher, Glauber Costa, Amos Wenger, Dan Luu… These will be mixed in with the monthly writethat.blog updates.