Robin Moffatt on Technical Blogging

“Writing is a great way to coalesce your thoughts and prove out whether you have fully understood something.”

Fitting for a data streaming expert, Robin Moffatt is both a producer and consumer of blog posts in this space. In addition to sharing his own take on “Data engineering, Kafka, and other nerdy stuff,” Robin ingests a steady stream of data-related blogs and publishes his favorites in monthly roundups of Interesting Links (also available as a Substack).

All that reading/writing leads to lots of blogging lessons learned – and those are nicely shared in the blogging section of his blog.

Here are Robin’s responses to our (now standard) tech bloggerly questions…

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

I was new to the world of Oracle, and learning lots about the tools as I went. One of the things that frustrated me was that the documentation and support knowledge base would just stop at a certain point and you’d have to figure things out for yourself. I benefited from others sharing their knowledge through blogging, and wanted to do the same.

That was over 15 years ago, and I’ve never found it not useful to keep writing and sharing. Writing is a great way to coalesce one’s thoughts and prove out whether one has fully understood something.

This year I’ve enjoyed writing a monthly series called “Interesting Links” which has proved popular, and helped me stay abreast of developments in the data ecosystem. I’ve even experimented with publishing it to Substack!

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

I got a job at a consultancy firm as a direct result of my blog posts. That was a very nice surprise. Since then, my blog has definitely helped me in my career, but less surprisingly given that I made the move from data engineering into DevRel and hence blogging became one of my core skills that an employer might be interested in :)

What blog post are you most proud of and why?

Can I pick more than one? One technical, one personal.

I wrote a blog post about configuring an aspect of Apache Kafka, called “advertised listeners.” It came up again and again in community spaces like Stack Overflow, and there was never a truly good answer (and lots of bad ones). I’m not a software engineer, so I sat down to understand it for myself by poking at it and reading what I could find, until I finally got my head around it. It took much longer than I’d expected, but the blog post was—and still is—really popular. I’ve had people IRL at conferences thanking me for it, which is nice.

The other blog post I’m particularly proud of is a personal one about the impact of travelling for work on your family. It’s something that’s not always discussed widely, and I realised that if I was struggling with it, perhaps others were too, and sharing it might help. I wrote a couple of follow-up posts too. The responses I got to these posts were very positive. It’s one of the things I love about having my own blog—I can write what I like, about any subject.

What post was the most difficult to write and how did you tackle it?

Probably the personal ones that I describe above. They were difficult partly because I didn’t really know what I wanted to say—or indeed, what I necessarily felt—until I started writing it, as well as the natural inclination as an Englishman to view anything personal as something to keep to oneself and tightly bottled up…

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

Yes, quite a few that I’ve shared in this blog post and talk ;) In short, just start writing! You don’t have to write “War and Peace,” nor do you have to write something that’s novel. Writing your experience of something is totally OK, even if someone else has already written it. Work out what your voice is, and nurture it. Oh, and for the love of everything holy: do NOT use AI to generate your writing. Using it to help (proofreading, bouncing ideas, etc) is totally a good idea. But generating it…hard no.

Your advice for people just getting started with blogging?

Use your own platform. Medium is a cesspit. Any platform that’s not yours could shut down tomorrow, or decide to gate the content, or sell it to the highest bidding AI company for training LLMs. A static site generator like Hugo, hosted on GitHub Pages or Cloudflare, is completely free, and it’s your content forever.

A few blogs that you particularly enjoy?

This makes me nostalgic for blogrolls :)

I love the biting yet eloquent snark in the writing style of Nikhil Suresh, a.k.a. Lucidity.

It was probably Mark Rittman’s writing that inspired me to start writing, and I’ve always enjoyed his easy way of describing how to use a technology.

Jack Vanlightly writes in a way that is mind-blowingly detailed yet clear, and always makes me feel stupid trying to understand it (in a good way).

Two blogs about the non-technical side of work that I really enjoy are Rands in Repose and Kelly Vaughn.

I use RSS to follow blogs, and have a curated list that I maintain through Inoreader, and share the feeds for these here.

Anything else you want to add?

Thank you for asking me; I’m honoured to be in such venerable company as those already on your site :)