31–40 of 173 posts
Because: no, I don't remember when maintaining a blog was the way to build your developer brand, nor that thoughtful technical writing alone would get you anything -- if no-one reads what you write, the result is the same as it's always been.
It's not tech related, just a personal blog.
I find readers by just posting links on my social media when I make a new post.
I keep writing because I love writing and certain people love what I write, so it keeps me going. Also, I'm delusional and I believe my blog is going to be one of the biggest in my country one day. Also, I write because there's a donation link on it and I hope to get some money from it from people who like what they read.
I have recently come to change my views on writing. I don't write to build a brand, and I don't primarily write in order to achieve some financial goals. I write to think, and I write to learn. Building a brand and achieving financial goals can be secondary effects.
There's also another argument to be made here: you mention LinkedIn broetry, Xitter, Medium, etc. These are all very centralized, partly tech-bro focused, platforms smack-dab in the middle of their respective enshittification processes.
I challenge you to not only maintain your own personal blog, but do so on your own infra, or at least in some form on the fediverse. Have your own small part of the internet, just as an expression of yourself.
I keep writing (https://taoofmac.com) because:
a) my wiki (looks like a blog, but it is a wiki, roughly 9500 pages of it these days - https://taoofmac.com/static/graph) is a public notepad of sorts, and I often do stuff that is either unique enough to not be documented anywhere or of interest to some technical fields (so many people found me because Google search used to work).
b) I refer to my notes frequently and share them, and it helps if they can be made public, especially when dealing with customers.
c) writing is sort of what I do. I like it, and it greatly benefits my ability to recall things. Every engineer on the planet should know how to write and communicate effectively, simply because explaining things always improves your ability to reason about problems.
That said, it's kind of weird to search for something I need to fix and come across my old self from 5-10 years ago.
I like _writing_ because it's an effective way of learning (at least for me), since explaining something is very different than "just" doing something. I don't track visitors/analytics on my blog, so I don't really care how many people read it, but it forces me to dive just a little bit deeper into topics than I usually would for side projects and experiments. I also have no problem admitting if I misunderstand something and/or that my way of describing something might not be 100% accurate, but at last it forces me to reason about it.
I find that I write a lot about my homelab these days, since a lot of the things I experiment with there are not things I would encounter at work, since they tend to be behind several layers of abstractions (think running bare metal hypervisors and messing around with ansible and zfs pools + hardware vs. getting a new EC2 instance via terraform).
I run my own forked blog template (ink-free for hugo) and have added fun little statistics - turns out, based on a pure word count, I wrote about 1.3x "The Hobbit" by Tolkien since 2016 (~128,000 words: https://chollinger.com/blog/tags/). My blog is decidedly a worse choice as far as literature goes, but writing all these articles taught me a lot.
Blogging has been of a great help to see me through some of the more challenging periods of my life. Just being able to empty my thoughts onto a page and not worry about chasing fame or notoriety has huge benefits. For me, anyway.
I hope this doesn't need an answer!
Define "worth it", but I've written a blog post about some printer driver issue two years ago and it now happened twice that someone (Older person, not very technical) reached out over email and asked for some further help and I could walk them step by step through using a Terminal, booting into macOS recovery mode and fixing the issue. The Apple store and Epson told them to do a clean install so they were very grate…
Other "worth it" could be the development of your writing skills, documenting own learning path and so on. Maybe something can be even useful for you as well later on.
If you think "worth it" as a way to get attention, get job offers automatically e.g., likely not worth it unless it gets HN front page.