Matt Butcher on Technical Blogging

"Blogging is a unique way of sharing knowledge 'in real time' as we learn"

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 Matt Butcher.

Matt is co-founder and CEO of Fermyon (for serverless WebAssembly). With a Ph.D. in philosophy, he’s as comfortable with Baudrillard as with bytecode. He's even guilty of an illustrated series introducing Kubernetes to children (parental advisory warning). All that results in a fantastic combination for a unique blogging style!

Over to Matt…

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

I first started blogging in earnest back in the early 2000s because I was at university and wanted to share that experience with the rest of my family. Somewhere along the line, I started a second blog to record (mainly for myself) the technologies and tools I was learning.

These early tech blog posts were pretty basic. I’d learn a new sed trick, and write a couple hundred words about it. I’d try a new code editor, take a screenshot, and write my basic impressions. Embarrassingly, sometimes my blog posts were terribly inaccurate. I once wrote one on optimizing tree walking algorithms that was totally wrong. But I just updated it later with a note that said I’d learned more and now realized there were better ways of doing things.

In those early days, I never used any analytics or anything. I had no idea if anyone ever read what I wrote. Then one day, a friend of mine got really into SEO and asked if I would set up Google Analytics and share with him so he could learn a bit. I was utterly shocked by what we learned: My blog had a ton of traffic, and some of the most basic posts (like the one about sed) were perennially popular.

I’ve blogged on and off since then. These days, I mainly post on the Fermyon blog. And those posts are more theoretical than my early how-to focused posts.

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

One day I was trying to write a regular expression. I knew there was a trick to it, but couldn’t remember what that trick was. So I googled it. Lo and behold, the first hit was a blog post I had written many years before that answered my question. I learned an invaluable lesson from that experience.

We like to think of ourselves as always progressing, always getting better. But we discount how quickly we forget things. In the past, I had already solved the problem that was plaguing me. That day, I started to view blogging as teaching “future me” about what “present me” was learning. And that change rippled through my view of writing and even of coding. Yes, I was maturing as a person and as a developer. I was learning, but also forgetting. Writing was a way of being able to capture my learnings externally so that I didn’t need to rely on my memory.

What blog post are you most proud of and why?

While it’s not the most popular or the most insightful, on February 9, 2022 I published a Hello World blog post for Fermyon, announcing to the world that we were coming out of stealth mode. I am proud of it for three reasons:

1. It gave a rough draft of the vision that we at Fermyon are still pursuing, and for that reason, it is a good thing for me to go back and re-read occasionally.

2. I was incredibly insecure about starting a new company back then. Writing that first blog post made me so nervous. And so there is a special sentimentality that I associate with it.

3. It was a blog post about how we wrote our own blog system based on our own technology. I was excited to be writing a first blog post on a blogging platform that I wrote. And I am still proud of that moment.

Is it my best blog post? Nope. But for me, it’s a monument to a specific time in my life, with a specific set of fears, hopes, and dreams attached.

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

We all have different approaches to writing. For me, I have moments where words just seem to flow out of me. In one particularly striking example, I once wrote nine 500-word blog posts in two days, each about a different topic. I published those posts over a three-month period.

At other times, I’ve experienced the opposite. I was so blocked this summer that for three months I couldn’t get past writing the title or opening sentence of a post. I got nothing done. It was a complete dry spell.

Writing is a creative act. When I’m feeling creative, I can easily write a blog post or even two or three or (that one time) nine! When that energy is low, though, writing might be difficult or even impossible.

But what got me out of my dry spell was undertaking activities that got me back into a creative mode. That involved some sketching, some long walks, and (yes) some downtime spent playing my favorite video game (Stardew Valley), which is itself a creative exercise. Somewhere along the line, I found myself getting new ideas or feeling a renewed interest in those blog posts I had started and then put aside.

Your advice for people just getting started with blogging?

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.

Stay tuned for more tech blogger spotlights. Coming up: Amos Wenger, Glauber Costa, Tanel Poder, Gwen Shapira, Avinash Sajjanshetty, Scott Hanselman… These will be mixed in with the monthly writethat.blog updates.