I like this post. When I restarted my personal site a while back, one thing I found mildly limiting was attaching it to my real name, which made me feel like I needed to present a semi professional vibe. I haven't stopped myself from the odd swear word, but there are things I'd like to write about that I would prefer to remain anonymous.
I've been considering starting a more freeform, anonymous site where I could cut loose a bit more. This post is somewhat encouraging in that direction.
This is something that's held me back a bit. My blog is at my email domain which means anyone I talk to could go read it. That means potential employers.
I might set up another domain for those topic that I start to write and abandon because it's not something I want attached to my professional image.
Lots of people throughout history - with names that are well-known today - have written at length about topics for which, in their day, the audience was very small. Herodotus, for one early example. Same is true for scores of important discoveries.
The audience for complex math proofs is very small. At first. Same applies to a lot of creative works ... paintings, photos, poetry. van Gogh sold almost nothing.
A composer once asked me 'what do you care more about - how many are listening, or who is listening?"
Amazing how many blogs have shut off their feedback.
I feel like it's a weird question that really wants you to say who but the situations where it's actually better is vanishingly small. If you want to be a professional musician you're way better off having a large fanbase making music snobs turn their noses up to then be a brilliant composer with 1000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Van Gogh realized none of the spoils of his work. I couldn't care less if I'm famous or influential after I'm dead, I only get these 80 years or so. Being the influential underground artist that inspired the people who got famous is an empty victory.
Even for something as simple as a blog having a large following is exposure. You have a better chance of finding quality discussion given more eyeballs.
I don't think comparing the writings of probably the most prominent figure of history writing to the platitudes (which is the 99% of 'blogs' being promoted here) generated by the average techbro grifter is the way to go with this...
2000 years ago Herodotus was talking and writing and nobody cared and his buddy was probably like, hey man remember that one guy from 300 years ago nobody knew who he was but look at him now! Everyone knows his name! And then some snarky roman was like, "I don't think comparing the great works of that guy from 300 years ago and the platitudes of this Herodotus guy is the way to go with this... " and he used the ellipsis even to indicate how little he respected this opinion to imply that he would say more but really what's the point with fools like these...
The difference being that I don't believe the digital archives of today will survive the test of time, as well as the Herodotus manuscripts.
Assuming we don't kill ourselves out of the planet, good luck to whoever will be digging hard drives 3000 years from now, and trying to understand what is stored in them, assuming the magnetic field is still readable.
Nit: In Herodotus's times Rome was small and humble city state. The snarky Roman would need to travel far far away from where people spoke Latin to be able to talk to Herodotus (in Greek!) although they both lived on Iberian peninsula.
Physical publications are routinely burned on schedule even by libraries. You can be sure of one thing is that almost nothing will remain from what we have 100 years from now
This makes a lot of sense, and these are the reasons I had a blog for a few years. But I looked at my analytics and realized that it was almost certainly literally only bots and my brother very occasionally reading the blog. So I stopped.
This is exactly my case as well! Don't stop writing just because of that, having a blog is cool even if nobody reads it. And you never know when it's going to be read anyway.
I'm just an average programmer, and English isn't even my native language. But i had a blog since I was 18, and although it went through some new domains, some of the small blog posts evolved to more bigger things that I still affectionately work on.
- I wrote a blog post about a CloudFlare when they were just starting, which landed me a gig to provide a technical review for a printed book.
- Some reverse engineered router/phone IMEI unlock codes lead to a complete website to generate them.
- An Instagram photo/video download tool that got so popular Meta sent me a UDPR and a C&D demand to shut down.
- Various talks in conferences, some that even paid me.
- Small web sites that spun off to their own web sites.
I would argue that an average person is exactly who should have a blog. Because, majority of us are average, and having a blog or a blog post related to a particular topic (even a mediocre one) gives the boost to stand you out. Some of these opportunities may not generate a lot of money, if at all. But I like the excitement I get from them.
"But all of these things [reasons why people don't care about your blog] are not a problem, because you shouldn’t care even a little bit about what other think."
I mean... Maybe you should care sometimes? Maybe it is good to try and not repeat others and try to express original and useful thoughts?
I have written some stuff in the past that was purely for me, but have also written explainers and other stuff that was actually meant to be of benefit to people who found or read it* (even if very few people did read it). This all-or-nothing stance is kind of silly. The title is also rather misleading, but I guess that's good for upvotes...
* I won't link to it as I don't mean for this to be a plug, but just as an example - I wrote "Things Everyone Should Know About Depression", because I found most articles of that sort lacking. And I put in a lot of work into making that a good post because I did care about its impact on potential readers, and I do think it probably helped some people.
Not everything has to be just written with only yourself in mind, even if fundamentally the reason to write should be that you want to write moreso than for the potential of getting lots of readers.
> I mean... Maybe you should care sometimes? Maybe it is good to try and not repeat others and try to express original and useful thoughts?
reminded of dfw: "true heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. this is the world."
The original blogs were about utterly mundane topics. One of the favorites was a guy who blogged what he ate for lunch every day. There may or may not have been photographs. And the audiences came because the WWW was a novel medium, and we just thought it was hilarious to have such a personal glimpse into a minor feature of a stranger's life.
My supervisor at my last job said I should start a blog. I suppose because I always ate at restaurants and I liked describing the food and stuff. But I'm not really a foodie, or eloquent like a food critic. Perhaps she just said that because I talk so much.
> personal glimpse into a minor feature of a stranger's life.
I feel sorry for people that feel this way about lunch. Lunch is sacred. It’s the part of the day to get away from work. Nothing at work is so important that you can’t get away from it. If you disagree, wait a few years, you’ll come around. I don’t care if it’s just a spam sandwich.
Agree with the title. Strong disagree with every bullet point. Those bullet points are seemingly true for the authors blog. But they don’t have to be true for yours!
Blogs are superior to conferences imho. A decent blog post will get about 10,000 views via HN/Reddit/Twitter/etc. A conference will only have dozens to hundreds of attendees.
I only make a few posts per year. I mostly avoid hot takes. Most of my posts I could have turned into conference talks. But conferences are kinda gross and blog posts are better so meh.
Maybe personal websites should be the "public square", not third party "social media" websites. Most folks probably won't bother with maintaining personal websites because they do not have anything meaningful to say. Instead, "social media" websites encourage all people, many of whom are only using these sites to communicate with friends and family, who otherwise have nothing worthwhile to say to the general public, to "share" their every thought. All in the name of exploiting these serfs/sharecroppers as ad targets for obscene profit. We have seen the results. It isn't pretty.
Just because "[y]ou can say whatever the fuck you want" to the entire web does not necessarily mean everyone will. At least, this is how I remember the web before so-called "tech" companies and "social media" hijacked it. The social media websites are desperate for others to create content for them, for free.
Absolutely. Even if everyone got their shit together to create a personal blog, you’re not going to find much readership if the sum total of your posting is mean, petty, one line trash talk, and whatever the blog version of subtweeting is. Discourse would instantly improve over the social media sewer (personal irony/hypocrisy notwithstanding).
You can't hide behind Section 230 if it's your own website with your own content.
If facing potential personal liability, there is a disincentive to trash talk on a personal website. Whereas with social media there is an incentive to trash talk as it apparently leads to "engagement".
'Everyone' had a personal blog a couple decades ago, and all it turned out to be was concentrated narcissism that was taken over by microblogging, which was all the same with none of the maintenance effort.
Social media very much has its roots in bloggers who couldn't see the internet as much more than an extension of their living rooms.
I agree. Don't use font sizes relative to the viewport size. Furthermore, it is unlikely that anything should ever be relative to the vertical viewport size (except in paged media, perhaps). Font sizes should not be relative to the horizontal or vertical viewport size. However, maybe there is exception if you want to set a maximum font size based on a percentage of the width so that all of the letters will fit. But, in my opinion it would usually be better to just avoid setting them by CSS anyways so that it uses the user settings or default settings instead, which should hopefully be set up for the specific display and user. (I often just disable CSS because of the mess they have made.)
Google penalizing sites for linking to other sites and people getting paranoid about bleeding pagerank and getting penalized for unknowingly linking to 'bad neighborhoods' - quickly changed how many people would peruse your blog..
Removing blog rolls, web rings, pingomatic, technorati... some blogs adapted, most did not.. google is the reason blogs aren't read these days.
Why write a blog when you can make a YouTube channel instead. You’re sure to get ranked well by Googs then. Hell, why write a blog when you can just TikTok it?
There’s lots of reasons not covered in the blog about not blogging trying to convince why to blog.
Presumably if you're allowed to write a blog even though it's boring etc etc you're also well within your rights to not gape all over your YouTube thumbnail.
These days I think about 15% of the thumbnails I see are gaping mouth. That would be easy to tweak down by stopping with watching LTT.
There is plenty of space for quality and thought out content on YouTube. Especially if you don't need to make a living. The kicker to me, seems the extra time required to get production value to a tolerable point.
Good question. Let me scroll through my YouTube home page. This is every video where the cover image shows the presenter’s face and the presenter is making a natural facial expression. Sometimes the presenter’s mouth is slightly open because they are talking, but they are not outright “soyfacing” as it’s sometimes called.
So that’s 16 normal facial expressions, four slightly exaggerated ones, and 1, maybe 2 soyfaces. And a much larger majority of videos that didn’t show the presenter’s face on the thumbnail at all.
Edit: It occurs to me now that it’s not that easy to see a YouTube thumbnail after you click through to the actual video.
In my case, it’s because videos take a long time to make. I don’t just film stuff and put it up. Postproduction takes three or four times as long as filming.
Writing, on the other hand, seems to “just flow,” and I spend a bit of time, after publishing, correcting and tweaking the prose. Nothing, compared to video postproduction.
As it is, I have barely written anything in the last couple of years, because I have had a fairly consuming project.
Maybe you don't want to have who knows what ads forced into your content. Maybe you don't want your content to be forced into this demented "shorts" format without an option to disable it. Maybe you want more control over formatting (code snippets, embedded videos/images) and content placement. Maybe you don't want to fight the stupid copyright enforcement tools. Maybe you dislike the UI overall. Maybe you don't want interactions with your audience to happen over google platform, but more individually over e-mail. Maybe you want an ability to modify past content easily. Maybe you get your audience from outside youtube, anyway, so why send them to the youtube attention sucking vortex.
You make a good point and we seem to agree that sharing content on the internet seems to be better discovered via tubes or toks than google.
I think there are plenty of great reasons to blog, and there will be more in the future.
Google really kneecapped the written word with a few sites as exceptions. Wordpress has struggled to make blogging better, along with the other publishing options..
However the written words are often a better way to communication certain things as you can have easy to follow links and more formatting that makes things sink in well.
Although 2023 is a perfect time to sing the 'video killed the radio (and written word) star' ... some things are aligning where that could shift.
Now that mobile theme styling is getting better, all it's going to take is a few changes like 'nofollow' links by default, easy to moderate web ring additions, animated talking heads and AI pics to include and we will see a re-emergence of great story sharing again, and google won't be needed for them to have impact far and wide.
I see activity pub helping with this in the future, and a few other things that are starting to get traction.
The original intent was meant tongue in cheek about the discoverability via googs. Admittedly, it seems like it was a bit too buried. I abhor googs retuning video links to something much more better suited as text. The fact people are getting better results because they took an SO answer and turned into a video of just the text with no other reinforced benefit from being a video is maddening
I disagree. Nobody cares about your blog … until they do. You might think everything you ever said could trivially be published on the front page of the New York Times, and yet, a journalist courting a well-placed source, who happens to not like you and is in the habit of working with journalists, might find bits in there, over time, to use against you.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t write a blog. But keep in mind your future self’s wellbeing. Your very future, responsible for hundreds of employees, 2 kids, a spouse, and significant economic or national responsibilities.
Exactly, and the author's list of reasons "why you should care about your blog" are reasons to care about your _journal_ because none of them argue in favor of making what you write public on the web...
A blog is still a fine thing to have if you don't have any expectations for it. A couple of times a year I am moved by something I've seen or heard enough to post about it. The act of turning that need into a few coherent paragraphs is very satisfying even though no one reads it. But, someone might someday under a bizarre set of circumstances. It's a message-in-a-bottle without contaminating an actual ocean.
Kinda a strange post that I don't quite agree with. Particularly:
> You’re not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn’t be publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving interviews.
Blogs and self-pub are often the only ways some information is shared by nature of the fact that academic publications don't publish things that don't obviously advance the state-of-the-art.
For example, one area I'm close with is computer security. While academia does some quite interesting work here, most major journals balk at the papers which discuss security mitigation defeats unless they're particularly zany (say, breaking ASLR using transient side channel attacks). Blog posts which detail how these mitigations work (ex. Siguza's post on Apple's proprietary APRR [1]) and how they can be defeated (ex. Project Zero's post which builds on Siguza's work to explore how APRR can be defeated in Safari's JIT [2]) provide considerable value to both security researchers, people who develop mitigations, and software people in general who are interested in learning how attackers think.
These sorts of works don't really belong in journals but that doesn't make them any less valuable.
Another great example is graphics studies of video games, a trend started by Adrian Courrèges[1]. I learned a lot from his blog and it really motivated me to start doing my own similar analyses of games I enjoy. I mean, I'm already comfortable using these tools from work, so why not?
Maybe I'll even post about it on my blog, sometime...
All four of those bullet points are flawed, and I think that's the point. They are _perceived_ reasons to not blog, rather than actual, legitimate reasons. That's my take anyway.
The point is that the first list is a series of (flawed) reasons that the author, and probably many others, have been discouraged from blogging.
And even if you know they're flawed, it can still get in your head and discourage you, so the author provides a different list of reasons to still blog in spite of that. It's not meant as proving/disproving any of the points, but simply as motivation to keep going.
That’s only your take away because you read the entire post where the author negates all of these points and reaffirms his belief that blogging is worthwhile.
>If you have lost time solving a superspecific problem then you need to write about it, it can happen that you end up being someone’s hero some day.
Aside from ramblings, most of my blog is various projects I’ve done and solutions I’ve found, and I continue to refer back to my own writing frequently to see how I accomplished something.
I blog about some things I do at work. A mix of things I found particularly interesting and some others asked me to write about.
It's partly a way to get approval to talk about some work details outside of the office, but also a bit of a behind the scenes thing from games I work on because I love reading that from others.
While I enjoyed this post, I can't say I agree with the motivating bullet points.
> Your blog is not original. [...] You’re just probably repeating things you’ve read in another place.
I'm usually not writing fluffy think pieces, but rather detailing specific technical solutions from a game I worked on. My solutions may not be original, but the context definitely is and this serves as a vehicle to share details about my work and start discussions of it with my friends.
> You’re not an expert in your field
I am certainly not a leading expert, but I do have expert knowledge which I know some find interesting and have learned from. Several blog posts are based on lectures I've held at work which fellow programmers seemed to really enjoy, so I'm happy I get to post about them publicly.
> You are only showing the world how stupid you are.
> If someone, at some point, cares about your blog will be only to criticize it.
These two points were my biggest worries before I started my blog. Luckily, it's proven unfounded. People generally have positive things to say about it and the one time someone questioned something led to an interesting discussion from which I learned a valuable trick I've since used in my work.
I even published a tool I made at work and got some encouraging comments and a few stars on GitHub, which is fun given how ridiculously niche it was.
I do. I write not just for others but also myself.
My little blog of few posts exists to satisfy my expectations and fulfill my rare urge of writing and the need of getting some thoughts out of my head. As long as nobody cares enough about my blog to monetize it, I'm perfectly fine with the status quo.
> If someone, at some point, cares about your blog will be only to criticize it.
And that's great! I may be able to learn something or at least I may get to know different view points.
204 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadhttps://stevenpressfield.com/2009/10/writing-wednesdays-2-th...
I've been considering starting a more freeform, anonymous site where I could cut loose a bit more. This post is somewhat encouraging in that direction.
I might set up another domain for those topic that I start to write and abandon because it's not something I want attached to my professional image.
The audience for complex math proofs is very small. At first. Same applies to a lot of creative works ... paintings, photos, poetry. van Gogh sold almost nothing.
A composer once asked me 'what do you care more about - how many are listening, or who is listening?"
Amazing how many blogs have shut off their feedback.
Even for something as simple as a blog having a large following is exposure. You have a better chance of finding quality discussion given more eyeballs.
Assuming we don't kill ourselves out of the planet, good luck to whoever will be digging hard drives 3000 years from now, and trying to understand what is stored in them, assuming the magnetic field is still readable.
I think it was a snarky Spartan.
Physical publications have a chance at existence though
- I wrote a blog post about a CloudFlare when they were just starting, which landed me a gig to provide a technical review for a printed book.
- Some reverse engineered router/phone IMEI unlock codes lead to a complete website to generate them.
- An Instagram photo/video download tool that got so popular Meta sent me a UDPR and a C&D demand to shut down.
- Various talks in conferences, some that even paid me.
- Small web sites that spun off to their own web sites.
I would argue that an average person is exactly who should have a blog. Because, majority of us are average, and having a blog or a blog post related to a particular topic (even a mediocre one) gives the boost to stand you out. Some of these opportunities may not generate a lot of money, if at all. But I like the excitement I get from them.
I mean... Maybe you should care sometimes? Maybe it is good to try and not repeat others and try to express original and useful thoughts?
I have written some stuff in the past that was purely for me, but have also written explainers and other stuff that was actually meant to be of benefit to people who found or read it* (even if very few people did read it). This all-or-nothing stance is kind of silly. The title is also rather misleading, but I guess that's good for upvotes...
* I won't link to it as I don't mean for this to be a plug, but just as an example - I wrote "Things Everyone Should Know About Depression", because I found most articles of that sort lacking. And I put in a lot of work into making that a good post because I did care about its impact on potential readers, and I do think it probably helped some people.
Not everything has to be just written with only yourself in mind, even if fundamentally the reason to write should be that you want to write moreso than for the potential of getting lots of readers.
reminded of dfw: "true heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. this is the world."
My supervisor at my last job said I should start a blog. I suppose because I always ate at restaurants and I liked describing the food and stuff. But I'm not really a foodie, or eloquent like a food critic. Perhaps she just said that because I talk so much.
I feel sorry for people that feel this way about lunch. Lunch is sacred. It’s the part of the day to get away from work. Nothing at work is so important that you can’t get away from it. If you disagree, wait a few years, you’ll come around. I don’t care if it’s just a spam sandwich.
Blogs are superior to conferences imho. A decent blog post will get about 10,000 views via HN/Reddit/Twitter/etc. A conference will only have dozens to hundreds of attendees.
I only make a few posts per year. I mostly avoid hot takes. Most of my posts I could have turned into conference talks. But conferences are kinda gross and blog posts are better so meh.
Maybe personal websites should be the "public square", not third party "social media" websites. Most folks probably won't bother with maintaining personal websites because they do not have anything meaningful to say. Instead, "social media" websites encourage all people, many of whom are only using these sites to communicate with friends and family, who otherwise have nothing worthwhile to say to the general public, to "share" their every thought. All in the name of exploiting these serfs/sharecroppers as ad targets for obscene profit. We have seen the results. It isn't pretty.
Just because "[y]ou can say whatever the fuck you want" to the entire web does not necessarily mean everyone will. At least, this is how I remember the web before so-called "tech" companies and "social media" hijacked it. The social media websites are desperate for others to create content for them, for free.
If facing potential personal liability, there is a disincentive to trash talk on a personal website. Whereas with social media there is an incentive to trash talk as it apparently leads to "engagement".
Social media very much has its roots in bloggers who couldn't see the internet as much more than an extension of their living rooms.
But that's ok, he doesn't care about what we think ;)
There was a time when sites promoted blogs via web rings and blog rolls - recent discussion -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36728870
Google penalizing sites for linking to other sites and people getting paranoid about bleeding pagerank and getting penalized for unknowingly linking to 'bad neighborhoods' - quickly changed how many people would peruse your blog..
Removing blog rolls, web rings, pingomatic, technorati... some blogs adapted, most did not.. google is the reason blogs aren't read these days.
On top of things mentioned in the post.
There’s lots of reasons not covered in the blog about not blogging trying to convince why to blog.
There is plenty of space for quality and thought out content on YouTube. Especially if you don't need to make a living. The kicker to me, seems the extra time required to get production value to a tolerable point.
https://youtu.be/PPWzsaAwOjQ
https://www.youtube.com/live/UAUg6y2UX88?feature=share
https://youtu.be/4sEFinMiSco
https://youtu.be/RdoKv0oojM8
https://youtu.be/SbeqNFHoU_8
https://youtu.be/v7CFo0XKLmo
https://youtu.be/cl-lZeLu2cg
https://youtu.be/-eJcJq2aWq8
https://youtu.be/YEW4U9DUtrw
https://youtu.be/WUwJteu_FqU
https://youtu.be/n0vLnHcz68I
https://youtu.be/FYCV5Ot4pcQ
https://youtu.be/1NZoWqs1T_s
https://youtu.be/X0QuB2v5rLw
https://youtu.be/4FRlV70lvYk
https://youtu.be/p3O6bKdPLbw
I stopped most of the way down the page. Here are the exaggerated facial expressions:
https://www.youtube.com/live/CN5bnEn9YZA?feature=share (sort of an exaggerated :|)
https://youtu.be/Iu7gAS4egEI
https://youtu.be/iQ190Bf-6J0 (the only actual “soyface” I could find)
https://youtu.be/zs6sEYEzsKo
https://youtu.be/VOVO0Mr4n-A
https://youtu.be/fpnd1OboPPs (borderline soyface maybe?)
So that’s 16 normal facial expressions, four slightly exaggerated ones, and 1, maybe 2 soyfaces. And a much larger majority of videos that didn’t show the presenter’s face on the thumbnail at all.
Edit: It occurs to me now that it’s not that easy to see a YouTube thumbnail after you click through to the actual video.
Writing, on the other hand, seems to “just flow,” and I spend a bit of time, after publishing, correcting and tweaking the prose. Nothing, compared to video postproduction.
As it is, I have barely written anything in the last couple of years, because I have had a fairly consuming project.
Plenty of reasons why someone would care.
I think there are plenty of great reasons to blog, and there will be more in the future.
Google really kneecapped the written word with a few sites as exceptions. Wordpress has struggled to make blogging better, along with the other publishing options..
However the written words are often a better way to communication certain things as you can have easy to follow links and more formatting that makes things sink in well.
Although 2023 is a perfect time to sing the 'video killed the radio (and written word) star' ... some things are aligning where that could shift.
Now that mobile theme styling is getting better, all it's going to take is a few changes like 'nofollow' links by default, easy to moderate web ring additions, animated talking heads and AI pics to include and we will see a re-emergence of great story sharing again, and google won't be needed for them to have impact far and wide.
I see activity pub helping with this in the future, and a few other things that are starting to get traction.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t write a blog. But keep in mind your future self’s wellbeing. Your very future, responsible for hundreds of employees, 2 kids, a spouse, and significant economic or national responsibilities.
> You’re not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn’t be publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving interviews.
Blogs and self-pub are often the only ways some information is shared by nature of the fact that academic publications don't publish things that don't obviously advance the state-of-the-art.
For example, one area I'm close with is computer security. While academia does some quite interesting work here, most major journals balk at the papers which discuss security mitigation defeats unless they're particularly zany (say, breaking ASLR using transient side channel attacks). Blog posts which detail how these mitigations work (ex. Siguza's post on Apple's proprietary APRR [1]) and how they can be defeated (ex. Project Zero's post which builds on Siguza's work to explore how APRR can be defeated in Safari's JIT [2]) provide considerable value to both security researchers, people who develop mitigations, and software people in general who are interested in learning how attackers think.
These sorts of works don't really belong in journals but that doesn't make them any less valuable.
[1] https://blog.siguza.net/APRR/
[2] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/09/jitsploitatio...
Maybe I'll even post about it on my blog, sometime...
[1] http://www.adriancourreges.com
Instead it seems to assume they are truths but argue that you shouldn't care that your thoughts are unoriginal and others laugh at your stupidity.
And even if you know they're flawed, it can still get in your head and discourage you, so the author provides a different list of reasons to still blog in spite of that. It's not meant as proving/disproving any of the points, but simply as motivation to keep going.
Aside from ramblings, most of my blog is various projects I’ve done and solutions I’ve found, and I continue to refer back to my own writing frequently to see how I accomplished something.
It's partly a way to get approval to talk about some work details outside of the office, but also a bit of a behind the scenes thing from games I work on because I love reading that from others.
While I enjoyed this post, I can't say I agree with the motivating bullet points.
> Your blog is not original. [...] You’re just probably repeating things you’ve read in another place.
I'm usually not writing fluffy think pieces, but rather detailing specific technical solutions from a game I worked on. My solutions may not be original, but the context definitely is and this serves as a vehicle to share details about my work and start discussions of it with my friends.
> You’re not an expert in your field
I am certainly not a leading expert, but I do have expert knowledge which I know some find interesting and have learned from. Several blog posts are based on lectures I've held at work which fellow programmers seemed to really enjoy, so I'm happy I get to post about them publicly.
> You are only showing the world how stupid you are.
> If someone, at some point, cares about your blog will be only to criticize it.
These two points were my biggest worries before I started my blog. Luckily, it's proven unfounded. People generally have positive things to say about it and the one time someone questioned something led to an interesting discussion from which I learned a valuable trick I've since used in my work.
I even published a tool I made at work and got some encouraging comments and a few stars on GitHub, which is fun given how ridiculously niche it was.
I do. I write not just for others but also myself.
My little blog of few posts exists to satisfy my expectations and fulfill my rare urge of writing and the need of getting some thoughts out of my head. As long as nobody cares enough about my blog to monetize it, I'm perfectly fine with the status quo.
> If someone, at some point, cares about your blog will be only to criticize it.
And that's great! I may be able to learn something or at least I may get to know different view points.