The impact of technical blogging

We interviewed a dozen(ish) expert tech bloggers over the past year to share perspectives and tips beyond Writing for Developers. The idea: ask everyone the same set of questions and hopefully see an interesting range of responses emerge. They did.

You can read all the interviews here. We’ll continue the interview series (and maybe publish some book spinoff posts too) in 2026. But first, we want to pause and compare how the first cohort of interviewees responded to specific questions.

Here’s how everyone answered the question “What has been the most surprising impact of blogging?”

antirez

That it is a fundamental carrier for software projects. You can’t have a successful project most of the time without communicating it. Sometimes it happens that developers who don’t communicate do things that are so important that other folks will communicate them, and the projects will still be successful. But in general, I believe that communicating, for developers, is a key asset for their projects, startups, whatever, to have any chance to become popular.

Thorsten Ball

The biggest surprise is probably that, over the years, readers have sent me very personal, very thoughtful emails about how a certain bit of writing has influenced and, believe it or not, helped them.

I mean, sure, yes, when you write and put something on the Internet, you hope that it resonates with someone and chances are — the internet is big — that it will: someone somewhere might think like you on this topic. But, still, it’s a surprise when you receive an email in which someone tells you how you influenced them and possibly changed the trajectory of their career, because they rethought their work after reading something you put out.

Matt Butcher

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.

Glauber Costa

It’s been quite surprising to see how well a blog post can reach people who might be interested in using your product. Don’t assume that you need a fancy marketing website. Especially if your audience is developers, what people really want is the pure technical opinions and information. Just capturing that in blogs generates a very large and healthy “inbound funnel” of interest for your product.

Phil Eaton

I was a bit shocked to see two of my posts cited in research papers. One post cited was my survey about parsing techniques in programming languages and the other post cited was a post I wrote about how databases build on top of key-value databases.

When you write about what’s weird or interesting to you, you might end up being one of the few people who have ever written about the topic. Mostly, I think, because relatively few people write at all!

Getting featured in a book about writing for developers was also pretty surprising. :)

fasterthanlime

I certainly didn’t expect my blog posts to be used for internal training at various big companies, but I guess it makes sense! That one’s a little bittersweet because, okay, I get name recognition, but that’s a form of payment my landlord doesn’t allow.

Another that’s more heartwarming is: I’ve been speaking up about my own mental health journey a bunch in articles and videos, and occasionally at conferences people approach me and thank me for talking about it, because it compelled them to seek help. That I’m extremely happy about, and it motivates me to keep talking about depression, medication, etc. — even though it makes me a little less employable each time :)

Aaron Francis

I got an email just the other day about one of the blogs that I wrote. The email said that I had changed this person’s life from one of the posts that I wrote. The post was called “What if you try hard?” and it was basically a call for people to go above and beyond and do more than just the minimum.

This person said that they took that advice to heart and started submitting conference talks and doing open source work – and then, because of that, landed a dream job that they never thought possible. That was probably the most impactful thing that I’ve ever heard from any of my work.

Eric Lippert

Every now and then I’ll get an email from a reader who says that they finally grasped a tricky concept after reading one of my articles on it, or that they were inspired to try a new thing, learn a new language, start a new project. It makes it all worth it to know that you’re connecting with people and helping them solve their problems. I was surprised by how common that was.

Charity Majors

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.

Gunnar Morling

Blogging opened up so many opportunities and connections for me over the years. In a way, it really formed the foundation for my career in the Java and data streaming space.

In 2009, I wrote a post about the Bean Validation API for data validation in Java. This caught the attention of the folks working on this project at Red Hat at the time, and they reached out to me to ask whether I’d be interested in writing the documentation for Hibernate Validator, the reference implementation of the Bean Validation specification. So I did that, and I became more and more active as a contributor to that project, which led to landing a job at Red Hat in 2012.

Also later, when moving to Decodable, and just recently to Confluent, my writing played an important role.

Tanel Poder

I think blogging and writing has made me a better problem solver. It has steered me towards trying to generalize and structure whatever solutions I happen to come up with in my work. I won’t just conclude that the “problem was a hang” and “solution was a reboot” and be done with it. I want to understand and dig deeper (that’s the fun research part) and generalize it to cover a wider range of issues. And once I’ve found a simple enough way to explain the whole chain of events, it’s the perfect time to write about it.

This kind of generalization and writing for a wider audience has created a positive feedback loop for my own thinking and work. I’m not just “printing out” the latest steps I had taken, but I fit them into a bigger picture.

As far as other surprises go, some articles from 15 years ago are still useful when dealing with real-life scenarios today. Many of my old articles are about things running on Solaris or HP-UX, but exactly the same problem patterns happen on modern Linuxes too. So, when dealing with a connection storm or a priority inversion issue in a latest Ubuntu Linux container, I can still point people to an old 2010 article about the fundamentally same “chain of events” I had documented before. On different platforms, the tools, naming conventions and terminology are different, but the pathology is the same.

Sam Rose

The first big “wow, this works” moment was getting approached by Google. It was 2013 and I was barely 2 years out of university when I got an email from a Google recruiter inviting me to interview. I ended up working there for 4 years and it was a formative experience, one that had a huge impact on my career trajectory, my understanding of myself, and my worldview.

These days, what surprises me is just how many people I’ve been able to make connections with online through this shared love of creation. People will DM me saying things like “I really love your load balancing post!” and I’ll reply “Thanks! Hey, do you wanna do a video call sometime?” and they almost always say yes.

Alternately, I’ll reach out to people I admire and say “I really loved your post on XYZ, would you be open to a video call about it?” and I think because I have an appreciable following and a body of my own work on show, people are more willing to say yes.

Preston Thorpe

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.