What to blog about

I like reading TIL-type posts when I'm searching for a particular topic. Sometimes a straightforward "this is how to do it" is what I'm after. Most of the time, it's nice to have some context: what were you doing, why did you need to do this, etc. That makes the post unique and, importantly, gives me some additional ideas related to the topic.

I think this is good advice. There are lots of links to an exact piece of code if you go to stack overflow. But few detailed discussions of how you get to the right answer and that's really helpful to beginners.

Julia Evans, who is currently in the front page of HN again, basically writes a variant of TIL all the time.

https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/11/06/making-a-dns-query-in-ruby-f...

So there's two things here: TILs and projects. I'm running a dev writers' retreat next week and happen to be thinking about this, want to suggest more:

- Superlatives: An interesting story about the first/last/best/worst experience when you did X. You see a lot of these in Rachelbythebay's work (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) . Mtlynch focuses more on documenting his journey semi-realtime (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)

- Data & News: This is a lot of work but collect data for yourself and publish it for others and others will find that useful. This is the strategy I am adopting for AI stuff https://lspace.swyx.io/p/open-source-ai. Dan Luu does this a lot to back up his work https://danluu.com/ The cutting edge of data is news, and you can see this on Gergely's substack (https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/) but you're basically a journalist at that point

- How $POPULAR_THING Works: This is Fly.io's (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and Alex Xu's strategy https://blog.bytebytego.com/

- Overviews: What your part of the dev ecosystem looks like to you. It'll never be perfect, it can't be. Some folks on HN will tear you to shreds for missing something obvious. But it will be immensely helpful to people just behind you in experience. See: How I write backends (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106482), The evolution of the data engineer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33317126), and my AWS vs Cloudflare post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28903982). Overviews become "Insights" when you can successfully reframe something in a new light that is useful for people to understand what is going on.

- Predictions/Wishlists: What is missing from your part of the ecosystem. The complement of the above. You can also invert it into a complaint post, like https://circleci.com/blog/its-the-future/ or https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2... but those are less constructive if entertaining

- Principles: Timeless things, a superset of the previous two points. See rauchg (Nextjs cocreator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8559519) and dan abramov (react core team - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18792373

- Caching: Anything - ANYTHING - you look up more frequently than 1x a year (For concepts, I have a Three Strikes Rule https://www.swyx.io/three-strikes, For lists, I have persistent lists https://www.swyx.io/fave-podcasts and https://www.swyx.io/new-mac-setup). This could be a TIL, but often is not; the more accurate description is treating your blog as a "local cache" of stuff you always use, with exact instructions and copy pastable code that fits for you and is verified to work by you. The TAM is of course way smaller but this is how stuff like https://www.swyx.io/download-twitter-spaces ranks on Google immediately because of course there are way more people googling for the same things.

in short - try to identify the most useful parts of your experience and make it legible to others. your earnest and consistent effort elegantly answers "why should I read this" to the reader as well.

Isaac Asimov wrote "Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare" and some talk show host asked him "Why did you write this? There are thousands of books about Shakespeare!"

He said, "Yeah, but not by me."

I think the truth is somewhere in between. If someone wants to write about what they've done for writing's sake, then fair enough to go the extra step of posting a blog about it. But there are plenty of blogs that seem to exist because the person first decided they wanted to have a blog and then came up with something to write about. Not SEO spam, more like résumé spam maybe? Those are still awful to wade through on search see l results.