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Write for yourself to help learn a skill and improve your ability to write future articles.
Worry about being the best written explanation.
For instance patio11 has gathered a huge blog audience, and he didn't do that by writing about things no one else had written about, or knowing more then everyone else.
But his writing is fucking amazing, and that's why I can read 20 pages of his writing while being barely able to make it through 3 paragraphs of other authors.
Blogging should be less about immediately building an audience and more about gaining a greater individual understanding for the topics you blog about. You might also find that with each post, you learn something new about writing, style, etc and will grow embarrassed about your original posts. You will learn how to communicate better, write better and gain a greater understanding of your own opinions by blogging eve…
Quantum computing understandable for simple tech people (not quantum physicists). There is so much noise (as in SNR) on the internet about this topic, and I think I have a reasonable grasp of it, but I don't have a big audience nor the time to write it all down. A good source on that would be great.
Machine learning: where are we and does it hold any promise for future work, or is it a dead end beyond optimizing what we're already doing with it? Neural networks sounded like "oh, with enough compute power, we can simulate a brain right?" but so far the models show no level of true understanding whatsoever (to the best of my knowledge).
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While writing answers on the IT Security StackExchange website, I often find that answers of mine which I found dull and uninteresting (they logically follow from basic knowledge) are popular in terms of views and votes. Usually it's somewhat predictable, but I'm regularly surprised by what people find interesting and useful. One example was about receiving email without a "to" field ('how did it end up in my inbox?'), which I thought was a niche question (only people who run their own mail server would have that, I thought, and they know SMTP right?), but 80 upvotes tell a different story.
And like other commenters said: it's not so much about what topic you choose, but about how well you can explain it. Of course pageviews is your quality of writing multiplied by the general interest level (bad quality but huge interest might still get you a lot of views), but most of the time there turn out to be a lot of people interested if you only explain it well, so the quality matters more than the topic.
At the risk of hijacking the comments thread: Any pointers on how to start blogging about a side-project? I've been working on a prototype, but it isn't quite operational yet. I'd like to start laying the groundwork, but I'm having trouble distilling my thoughts into actual blog posts.
That's a defeatist attitude that will sap your energy and make sure your blog is short lived.
Now, I definitely understand the sentiment, because there are a lot of smart folks out there writing on the internet. However, it simply isn't true that you don't have anything to say, even on a topic that has been written about over and over again.
What I'd suggest is writing about something that you are passionate about and willing to investigate. And I'd suggest primarily writing for yourself and your understanding rather than to be a famous blogger or find a job (those might be byproducts, but they're unlikely, whereas gaining knowledge is pretty much guaranteed).
The topic could be a problem domain (real estate tech, fintech) or a specific technology (AWS RDS, Google cloud spanner) or even development techniques (TDD, mob programming).
Pointing to other interesting posts and riffing on them is a great way to get started, but do be prepared to spend some time writing original content. Don't feel you have to find your perfect topic immediately, you can wander a bit.
Source: I've been blogging since 2003.
Do you use any proprietary or closed source products? Many (not all) of those have poor quality, perfunctory documentation, and if you work with them a long time you'll development knowledge by means of experimentation, reverse engineering and support tickets.
Try blogging some of that, or develop it into some alternative documentation, book, or presentation. Become a well-known independent expert.
I wish there were more good blogs about testing, refactoring and teamwork on Rails projects. Not idealized forms of it, but talking about real refactors.
If you manage to bridge the gap between the real world and theory, that is wonderful. Show me how in a 100k LOC Rails app that's 10 years old how to refactor my User class to obey SRP and I'll follow your blog for life.