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Why blog if nobody reads it?

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Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#281

Post by whereistejas »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #275
benrutter wrote: post #247

A lot of the comments here are about blogging to nobody (which I do) but I wanted to share how much I love reading people's personal blogs. I follow a bunch of developers (surprise surprise) and read mostly technical blogs, I've found a lot of developers mix writing blog posts about their personal and family life alongside technical posts. As I've been reading I've found those are some of my favourite posts, as someo…

> I follow a bunch of developers (surprise surprise) and read mostly technical blogs As a follow-up, how do you go about discovering the people you keep up with if they are not personal acquaintances?

I often do this by reading the bio of different HN commenters or X (aka, stalking) and adding the RSS feed to my news reader app (or, bookmarking).

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#282

Post by genezeta »

I write in the hope that nobody ever reads it. It's all sad and depressing stuff.

I could, as some have suggested, write but not publish it online. But... probably in some way it's the habit from older times when I wrote about programming. In any case I do delete most of the stuff without ever uploading it, and frequently delete a lot of the stuff I did upload.

I write because it helps me seeing it written down. I write because I don't speak much with anyone any more.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#284

Post by wonger_ »

fm2606 wrote: post #274

If trying to solve a problem and errors keep occurring, how does one capture the errors (and inputs that caused the error) in order to blog about later without disrupting the flow of problem solving? For example, I was writing a terraform script and I kept getting errors. I would change one thing, run plan and apply, get another error, rinse and repeat until I fixed it. I would like to keep a record of all these erro…

Personally, I keep a text file as a "debugging journal" and just append a line every time I try a new step. For example, this is what I wrote down after recently trying out a local LLM:

  llama.cpp
  - idk why there's so many llama versions to install on yay
  - i went with llama.cpp-bin, because it was built with libcurl and the first one i tried apparently was not
  - but i had to remove llama.cpp-git-debug from a previous installation
  - remember yay -Q | grep ... to check for installed packages
  - the cli interface changes; i ended up with --hf-repo ggml-org/qwen2.5... --hf-file qwen25....
  - the huggingface.com page probably has the most accurate and up-to-date instructions
  - my goal: fast, offline, generalized/automatic autocomplete
  - localhost:8080 to access web ui after running llama-server
They're quick notes, and they actually help me problem solve, not disrupt me. I'm casual about it, though. I'm not copying every input and output verbatim. I think the idea is to leave yourself enough breadcrumbs so that you can reproduce, grab screenshots, and copy error messages later when you're not in the zone. Hope this helps.

Also, note that I'm most likely to publish a blog post in the following days while the problem is still fresh in my mind. If I wait months or years, it's pretty much doomed to stay in /drafts forever.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#285

Post by nthingtohide »

MrVandemar wrote: post #265
nthingtohide wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google should create a walled garden of blogsearch, on the lines of Google Scholar, have some top-down verfication of good content / blogs. In the age of AI, such a product could act as a discovery mechanism for authentic human writings which could be included in training data for LLMs (uncontaminated steel even in age of AI).

What an appalling idea. 1. A walled garden? Run by Google? Aside from locking this discoverability away in a walled garden, how many years before Google kills it out of corporate disinterest? 2. So, blogs with Google tracking promoted higher? Blogs with copyright information excluded as it is not legal for LLM's to train on it? What do you think would happen? It's fraught with problems.

I think if Google hadn't killed Google Reader, the metadata from blogs and reading habits of populace would be so invaluable in today's LLM world. It would be sort of loosely speaking its own kind of social network for powerusers, every other opinion is downstream or rehashing from that.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#287

Post by pplonski86 »

> You write because you think, because you observe, because you need to put it somewhere.

This resonates with me. Many things get more precise when I write down my thoughts or explain them to others.

For my company, I use the blog to explain how my software is working, I'm using blog for that as well. It is a good marketing channel.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#288

Post by fm2606 »

wonger_ wrote: post #284
fm2606 wrote: post #274

If trying to solve a problem and errors keep occurring, how does one capture the errors (and inputs that caused the error) in order to blog about later without disrupting the flow of problem solving? For example, I was writing a terraform script and I kept getting errors. I would change one thing, run plan and apply, get another error, rinse and repeat until I fixed it. I would like to keep a record of all these erro…

Personally, I keep a text file as a "debugging journal" and just append a line every time I try a new step. For example, this is what I wrote down after recently trying out a local LLM: llama.cpp - idk why there's so many llama versions to install on yay - i went with llama.cpp-bin, because it was built with libcurl and the first one i tried apparently was not - but i had to remove llama.cpp-git-debug from a previous…

It does help, thank you. I was thinking that I'd just have to change my process a bit to capture what I need/want to document properly.

For me, a few days might as well be a year in trying to remember :-(

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#289

Post by greazy »

genezeta wrote: post #282

I write in the hope that nobody ever reads it. It's all sad and depressing stuff. I could, as some have suggested, write but not publish it online. But... probably in some way it's the habit from older times when I wrote about programming. In any case I do delete most of the stuff without ever uploading it, and frequently delete a lot of the stuff I did upload. I write because it helps me seeing it written down. I wr…

I've also started writing sad and depressing stuff just for me. It's helped my mental health tremendously.

I've only just started. How long have you been writing and do you publish it online?

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#290

Post by benrutter »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #275
benrutter wrote: post #247

A lot of the comments here are about blogging to nobody (which I do) but I wanted to share how much I love reading people's personal blogs. I follow a bunch of developers (surprise surprise) and read mostly technical blogs, I've found a lot of developers mix writing blog posts about their personal and family life alongside technical posts. As I've been reading I've found those are some of my favourite posts, as someo…

> I follow a bunch of developers (surprise surprise) and read mostly technical blogs As a follow-up, how do you go about discovering the people you keep up with if they are not personal acquaintances?

Big one for me is that I follow blogs of developers for open source projects I'm interested in. If I see someone is working on a cool project I'll check out their github profile, and that sometimes turns up a personal blog.
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