Preston Thorpe on Technical Blogging
"Writing in public" from prison
We’ve interviewed over a dozen expert tech bloggers, so it’s not surprising that we’ve seen a range of writing motivations and experiences. Still, this one stands out. Today, we’re featuring Preston Thorpe, a self-taught software engineer now working for Turso.
Preston writes his blog, Inside Thoughts, from “the other Mountain View”: Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston, Maine. His posts cover topics ranging from optimizing Turso’s WAL checkpointing with io_uring async I/O, to reflections on programming, to how he started coding professionally while incarcerated.
Note: Last month’s interviewee, Aaron Francis, just shared an in-depth chat with Preston. They discuss redemption, resilience, and rewriting SQLite in Rust.
Over to Preston…
Why did you start blogging – and why do you continue?
Honestly, I don’t think I made a conscious decision to start blogging. I just remember being involved in open source projects and my story wasn’t really out there yet. And it felt odd that nobody knew my situation.
I didn’t want to just flat out randomly tell people that I’m incarcerated. So I decided that I’d write my story down for anyone to find if they came across my profile. I really did not expect for many people to actually read it, so it was pretty shocking to see it on the front page of HN a couple days after it was published.
I try my best to keep writing, although I don’t write as often as I should. Writing an in-depth technical blog post about a feature built or a problem solved allows me to fully absorb and understand it even better than just implementing it, so this is another reason I feel like I will continue to write. It serves as both personal motivation to more deeply understand something I am working on, as well as a way to share that knowledge with others.
What has been the most surprising impact of blogging for you?
I will never get used to the emails I receive, mostly from younger people like students or people with similar kinds of backgrounds, who reach out to tell me that they were inspired by my story. One of them in particular was from a kid who had read my first blog post a couple years ago. He said that it helped him make a tough career choice to transition into software engineering at the end of his college degree, and that he has since gotten a job in the field.
As much as I love helping people, I wrote the post more to get it off my chest and explain myself to the world. I didn’t imagine that as many people would end up relating to it as much as they have, and that it would actually provide inspiration for others to have similar journeys.
What blog post are you most proud of and why?
Probably my first post, “How I got here.” I certainly want to be known for my more technical achievements and I never wanted to strictly classify myself as “the programmer in prison,” but that post really set the stage for everything that came after it. I hope to keep writing more technical posts in the future, and I haven’t had any purely technical posts gain as much attention as that first one yet. I think it will be a while before I can top that one in terms of personal significance.
What post was the most difficult to write and how did you tackle it?
Once again, probably my first post. It was difficult to write because there are a lot of touchy subjects involved and I try to be respectful of everyone’s perspective, even if I don’t personally agree with it. It’s always a balance of explaining your own personal perspective while being sensitive to the fact that other people may have very different experiences. I just tried to be as honest and straightforward as possible, and I think that approach resonated with people.
Any lessons learned that you want to share with the community?
You will never please everyone, and the people who are going to overly criticize and critique everything you do are going to do so, no matter what. Focus on the people who appreciate your work and the positive impact you can have, rather than trying to appease every single critic out there.
That being said, with technical content especially, still make sure to be extra thorough when making claims or explaining concepts because someone will call you out on it every time if you get anything wrong.
Also, you will always continue to learn, and blogs are a good metric to go back and look at in a year’s time. You can reflect on how much you have learned since. I know I have gone back to old technical posts and had a good laugh at how naive I was at the time. This is another reason to write, even if you don’t feel like you are reaching any particular audience.
Your advice for people just getting started with blogging?
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.
A few blogs that you particularly enjoy?
Miguel Young - https://mcyoung.xyz/
Thorsten Ball - https://thorstenball.com/ and https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/
Matklad - https://matklad.github.io/
Phil Eaton - https://eatonphil.com/
Avinash Sajjanshetty - https://avi.im/blag/
Editor’s note: We’ve already interviewed Thorsten and Phil — and we’re hoping to feature Miguel, Matklad, and Avinash (V) soon!
