Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Engineers Should Blog

insights.excitingrole.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 130 posts

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#21

Post by noobiemcfoob »

lossolo wrote: post #12

You should certainly blog if you did something different, something that is innovative, if you solved an interesting problem. But.. lets be honest, political correctness aside. Most software engineers have nothing to blog about, they just glue some libraries and make couple of db requests and that's about all they do. Nothing what they do is innovative or worth blogging about. Not every engineer should blog or we wou…

The specific problems encountered and methods that proved to be a workable solution for an engineer when gluing any set of arbitrary modules is practically guaranteed to be unique information, though mired in a ton other, more mundane information.

It'll be the mark of a good writer to properly cut the content from the fat.

But this isn't about being a good writer. It's about improving your own understanding and simply widening our dataset of known engineering practices.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#22

Post by enqk »

xiphias wrote: post #3

When I read ,,the only thing you need is an editor'', I thought how cool it would be if what I write would be reviewed by some people before going public...it would make me less shy about it. Then I realized he means a text editor (though he's an editor himself)

I try to run my articles through my kind colleagues and ex-colleagues before any publishing. It helps clarifying bits that are potentially misunderstood. People are however a bit shy so I don't get style recommendations often

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#23

Post by Rapzid »

What do people view as good blogging platforms for this stuff these days? Jekyll on Github? Something else? I'd like to get going fast focusing on content, but of course want good syntax highlighting, comments, and such features.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#25

Post by noobermin »

May be some hacker should make a NN to produce hipster-hacker blogposts so they don't need to. Just do a couple posts, train on those, and sit back and get both the creds for having a happening medium profile while maintaining your productivity.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#26

Post by jlgaddis »

PretzelFisch wrote: post #4
xiphias wrote: post #3

When I read ,,the only thing you need is an editor'', I thought how cool it would be if what I write would be reviewed by some people before going public...it would make me less shy about it. Then I realized he means a text editor (though he's an editor himself)

That's my biggest problem, how do you improve your written communication without an editor? You can do the same thing over and over and call it practice, but without a reviewer how will you magically improve this skill?

This is the Internet. Simply write something, others will be quick to correct your grammar and spelling mistakes.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#27

Post by joshvm »

Rapzid wrote: post #23

What do people view as good blogging platforms for this stuff these days? Jekyll on Github? Something else? I'd like to get going fast focusing on content, but of course want good syntax highlighting, comments, and such features.

Jekyll is pretty great (just chuck a disqus block in your footer), there's a real risk of getting bogged down in setting up the 'perfect' system with it and never getting round to publishing anything.

I think Wordpress still has one of the most outstanding install experiences, but keeping it up to date is a pain.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#28

Post by Rapzid »

joshvm wrote: post #27
Rapzid wrote: post #23

What do people view as good blogging platforms for this stuff these days? Jekyll on Github? Something else? I'd like to get going fast focusing on content, but of course want good syntax highlighting, comments, and such features.

Jekyll is pretty great (just chuck a disqus block in your footer), there's a real risk of getting bogged down in setting up the 'perfect' system with it and never getting round to publishing anything. I think Wordpress still has one of the most outstanding install experiences, but keeping it up to date is a pain.

Cool, I may give Jekyll another shot(had a false start couple years ago).

I have tons of experience doing hardened WP installs(and compromise root cause) but almost no experience USING it haha. I'd prefer not to go down that rabbit hole if something like Jekyll is sufficient.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#29

Post by katpas »

lossolo wrote: post #12

You should certainly blog if you did something different, something that is innovative, if you solved an interesting problem. But.. lets be honest, political correctness aside. Most software engineers have nothing to blog about, they just glue some libraries and make couple of db requests and that's about all they do. Nothing what they do is innovative or worth blogging about. Not every engineer should blog or we wou…

Sometimes gluing together libraries in a certain way can produce an error or behaviour that's not documented (as it's outside the scope of each individual project) as either nobody has tried to do that before or they've not written about it.

Multiple times now it's been an obscure blog post found on google that's given the answer to those issues.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#30

Post by srcreigh »

pavfarb wrote: post #20

Engineers should blog publicly when they have something to say. Something useful for their colleagues. Engineers shouldn't waste time forcing themselves to blog instead of work just to push their career forward: frequently they just expose they don't have anything to say in extremely unreadable way. What a waste of time for everybody. Soft skills helps you grow as an engineer, it's true, but I think it's important to…

Many times you don't know what's useful to your colleagues until you hit publish. Writing is useful as experimentation that way.
Post reply on HN