Ask HN: How to monetize a technical blog without bloating it

Besides the obvious choices (advertisement), you could look for sponsors to sponsor your posts (if you have enough visitors).

Affiliate and eproducts. A lot of bloggers are against monetizing right off the bat, but if you can drive an audience to your blog then you should be able to drive them to click buy every once in a while.

Usually, technical blogs are vehicles to sell a product or service, or promote the author.

I'd prominently add how to contact the author for consulting opportunities. That's certainly going to give you orders of magnitude more business than any ad.

Or is it a more generic site?

I think the best thing is to offer information products as i call them .

ebooks , tutorials , source code , video lessons , related apps.

this is what your Target Audience are probably looking for .