Technical blogging lessons learned
We interviewed a dozen(ish) expert tech bloggers over the past year to share perspectives and tips beyond Writing for Developers. In this final 2025 remix post, let’s look at how everyone answered the question “Any lessons learned that you want to share with the community?”
Note: 1) You can read all the past interviews here. 2) We’ll kick off a new round of interviews next week, starting with Simon Willison.
Thorsten Ball
What has helped me the most:
Setting time limits. I started Register Spill with the idea of using 60min every Sunday to write. Whatever gets written in those 60min gets published. It helped me get over a lot of “but...” in my head.
Fixed schedule. I never wrote on a fixed schedule and started Register Spill partly in order to see whether I could. Now I know three things. (1) I can, (2) it can be stressful, (3) it helps to get stuff out.
Keeping drafts on my phone helps. I use Apple Notes and whenever I have an idea for a post, I jot it down, ignoring all spelling, punctuation, and so on. Then, over the course of a day, multiple days, weeks, I keep tweaking that note. On my phone, or on my computer. (I tweaked this very Q&A on my phone for multiple days before now sitting down, in front of my computer, to finish it).
Tanel Poder
One unexpected thing I learned is that it’s not worth distracting yourself from your target audience (which hopefully includes you), even if your planned next post might end up popular. Example: Some years ago, there was a Gmail web UI update and your email reply composing boxes were sized very small. This was not good for techies who sent wide command line tool outputs and code samples in their emails.
So I found a trick for expanding the Gmail reply compose box to full screen that’d be suitable for technical content and blogged about it – hoping that it’d be useful for a much wider audience. Indeed, it did reach a wider audience, but the end result was that my blog’s comments section ended up full of general email, Windows or printer troubleshooting questions from all over the Internet. I took that post down later on.
Also, blog commenting is pretty much in social media now, so you might want to add backlinks to your social media posts about your latest blog to the end of the article. I’ve been too lazy to do this myself though.
And last, I’m happy about my move to static hosting from a managed “CMS” system. The product details don’t really matter, but I moved from Wordpress to Hugo static hosting, where all my blog entries are stored in a GitHub repo. I feel better when treating my blog writings and updates as just code, stored in a repository and rendered to the public-facing HTMLs when needed. Your static page load times will be much better too, especially when a post of yours gets popular.
Sam Rose
Yeah, a few things.
I wish I’d found my “thing” earlier. Making use of visuals, interactivity, and vibrant colours to explain boring or scary topics is something I could have been doing years before I started. Take time to think about your own experiences and ambitions. How could you combine 2-3 things you know well, or would happily spend time getting better at, to create something novel and valuable?
Listen to all feedback, but be picky about what you act upon. Every one of my post-2023 blog posts has received contradictory feedback. You aren’t going to please everyone, and you shouldn’t try. Work on knowing what’s important to you, and what you want from your work. How do you want people to view you? What do you want people to take from your work?
Don’t let the numbers suck the joy out of it. Don’t let the tail wag the dog. Don’t write something just because you want to ride the current hype wave, or because you want to hit the best SEO phrases. Do it because you want to.
To elaborate on the 2nd point, I’ll give you some examples of what’s important to me.
I want my work to be visually beautiful. I want people to say “oh, wow” when they open it. This is why I use vibrant colours and have developed my own visual style.
I want my work to be accessible. I put effort into getting better at accessibility with every post. I know I’m not where I want to be with this yet, but it is important to me to keep improving.
I want my work to help people understand things they didn’t think they could. This is why my work tends to be introductions to topics.
Phil Eaton
So many lessons, so many suggestions, because I hear so many different reasons people have for not writing or writing but not completing and publishing. However, to summarize it all I would stress that when you speak humbly and in good faith, the internet is incredibly helpful and forgiving, whether you’re an expert or not. So the stakes are just so low and the potential benefits to yourself and others are so great.
And in terms of what to write about, I think you should 1) write about whatever you feel like writing because the first big challenge is your own motivation and 2) focus on what is confusing to you!
Lastly, writing blog posts doesn’t need to be a public thing! It’s immensely useful to you and your team if you publish internal blog posts that the public will never see. If you can publish publicly, that is nice for you and the company. But don’t be under the impression that if your company is particularly secretive, you can’t participate in all the value blogging brings.
Preston Thorpe
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.
Matt Butcher
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.
Jeff Atwood
Just write. Make a habit of writing. It’s like exercise. It’s like anything else…mental health. What are the fundamentals of mental health? Are you eating? Are you sleeping? Are you exercising? Are you having sane interactions with friends and family? These are the fundamentals. And I would add another fundamental to that: Are you writing? Are you formulating a story of why the things that are happening to you are happening to you, and what you can do about that, and what it means? That’s an important part of the formula.
A lot of stuff just randomly happens. But a lot of stuff happens because we chose our own adventure, we chose a certain path, we made a choice. And if you write about that – I made this choice, and it was a good choice, or it was a bad choice, and I learned all these things – you’re not just helping yourself, you’re helping so many other people behind you.
So write regularly, pick a writing schedule that you can live with, and treat it like an exercise regimen. Your blog posts don’t all have to be perfect. Don’t worry; don’t think, “Oh, I can’t write because it’s embarrassing or it’ll be bad.” Everybody’s bad at some level. But you know how you get better? By doing it regularly – not necessarily every day, but on a schedule. That’s how you get better at stuff. That’s how you practice and learn – by doing something regularly, ideally, with feedback.
It’s a lot like my advice to people who are single. How are you going to get into a relationship if you don’t leave the house (before Tinder, at least)? Step one, leave the house. Go to places where other people are present and meet people. Applying that here, just pick some form of writing that works for you, and do it. But I will say, please go beyond chat. Chat is more of an ideation tool. I’m a true believer in writing. Writing is so core. Pick a writing schedule and stick to it.
Gunnar Morling
A common question I see is “What should I write about?” Or, “Everything has been said already, what should I add?” While it’s true that there’s a lot out there already, I think there’s always value in sharing your own personal perspective on things. Nobody will look at a certain topic or question with exactly your background, experience, and context, so there will be a unique angle to that.
There’s a huge demand for entry-level content on all kinds of technologies, so just sharing your own experiences, for instance from learning about a new language, library, or tool, will be useful for the next person in a similar situation. In fact, you might actually be better able to relate to that perspective of other beginners than a person highly experienced with the subject matter!
And don’t forget that you are your own reader too. I can’t count how many times I went back to a blog post I wrote some time ago to read up on some details I had forgotten since then.
Glauber Costa
Even to this day, I am 100% unable to predict which blogs will do well and which blogs will not. Don’t spend too much time trying to figure out whether something is going to work. You will never know. If you have an idea, just write it!
For instance, take the post I wrote on io_uring in 2020. I was actually very reluctant to write that one. ScyllaDB’s CEO [Dor Laor] really pressured me to get some results and share them in a blog, but my initial response was “Why? Nobody really cares about this.” It turns out, that was my best performing article ever. It was a Hacker News hit and it still gets a steady stream of traffic.
Honestly, I see no correlation between what I think will do well and what actually does well – and vice versa. So just write… and some of them will eventually do well.
fasterthanlime
Building your own blogging software is totally fine actually. I’ve been doing it for five years and it’s pretty decent by now. Of course it helps that maybe a third of my content is actually about how I built my own blogging software.
All kidding aside, mhhh: when people tell you to write about things you’re passionate about, it’s not just wishful thinking “if you build it they will come” type of stuff. It’s also that if you build something you really hate (but you think is going to be successful), and they do come, then you’re stuck maintaining that. It’s like how in dating there’s a fine line between projecting a positive image, but also being authentic, to avoid having to keep up a charade if they actually fall for you.
So it’s not like, “following your heart magically makes for a successful business,” it’s more like “the chances it works are slim anyways, might as well do it some way you enjoy.”
Eric Lippert
So many! But let me just pick one. If your blog is successful, it will attract criticism, and that’s a mixed bag. Criticism that genuinely points out ways your post could be more clear, or more accurate, or more complete, or whatever, is gold – even if it is delivered tactlessly. Don’t pass up an opportunity to make improvements or admit it when you’re wrong.
Criticism that is ad hominem, or spammy, or factually wrong, or abusive, you’re allowed to delete that! Joel Spolsky once said something like “Deleting rude comments isn’t censorship any more than cleaning up other people’s garbage off your lawn is censorship.” If someone wants to write their own blog on their own server about how terrible your posts are, that’s their business. You don’t need to provide a site to showcase other people’s low-quality comments.
Charity Majors
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.
antirez
Try to write posts that are both information-dense AND entertaining. Refuse the magazine-style layout, with posts starting like “When in 1955 Mary Smith started to work at XYZ, she could never have thought that ABC was so 123.” Blogging must be the other possibility of writing, a more honest one.
Aaron Francis
The most important thing is that you press publish. It’s better to publish 12 blog posts a year than spend a year fretting over a single post. You’ll get better as you go and you’ll get better as you publish.
