Ask HN: What are some technical topics I can blog about?

There are articles about really interesting subjects, but I can't get through them because of the way they're written. Conversely, there are articles about not very interesting subjects that I devour because they're well written. Don't worry about what others write about, just pick subjects you enjoy and keep writing and practicing. Those are the things that show.

This is good advice. I too have a personal blog that I mostly neglect. This past week we "cut the cord" on our cable TV service at home and the process has inspired me to blog. I've been composing blog posts "in my head" for the past few days and I take this as a good sign about my future intentions.

I have thoughts on Xfinity's value, YouTube TV's ad policies, Hulu's DVR restrictions, Roku's awesome interface - all good useful resources for those researching the same process.

In contrast, some weekends I'll sit down (without an idea) to compose a new blog post and frequently hit a wall.

I don't think it's mandatory to write about novel or innovative things. It's your blog, you can write what you want.

Agree with the write for yourself mindset.

I am kind of doing the same thing on my blog https://flaviocopes.com where I write every single day (personal challenge) about some particular thing related to Web programming, and I mainly write for me, because I don't have a good long term memory and every time I need to use X I reference what I learned n months ago about it. That's much better than searching again and again "that post" you remember that clarified the thing for you.

Turns out this is useful for other people too, as I can see in the positive feedback I get.

After some time I started rewriting old posts to improve them / add more things I learned, as your writing style evolves.

So, my advice is, just start and stick to it.

I'd take a subject that busy engineers would be interested in knowing more about but don't have the time it take to investigate it. I.e. going in depth about how the chrome debugger work in javascript to analyze performance. I remember reading a blog post about it and a few weeks later it really helped me.

You could write about new programming languages or new algorithms that just came out. Anything with nice animation is a plus. (I.e. to illustrate the algorithm)

Another thing that I find interesting is interviewing great people in the field. Often, there are questions I wish I could ask them that most other interviewers don't because they're not technical enough.

You can write about weird bugs that you encountered, how you fixed them and what lessons you learned.

The easiest is to find a dataset and analyse it. Pull together information from different sources. Write a web crawler, etc.