Simon gives some solid, and surprising, advice for technical bloggers:
My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.
Some topics I think are always worth writing about and sharing:
- Your process, failures and successes, to figuring something out
- How to hack on some major open source project
- In-depth comparison of projects or approaches, down to source code, benchmarks, and architecture when relevant
- Building minimal versions of some production system
- How some major systems works under the hood, down to the code
- Mistakes you made in structuring organizations, or production architecture, or testing, etc.
- How to get the dang configuration right for testing Electron apps in Github Actions
Lots of good advice about blogging in this post, like writing with a time limit:
Setting time limits. I started… with the idea of using 60min every Sunday to write. Whatever gets written in those 60min gets published.
Or this one from Jeff Atwood about making writing a habit:
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?