I didn’t think my second blog ever would already be a meta post about blogging, but, facing a lack of an actual topic related to tech, because consistency makes the habit, and because I did not want to skip posting this week, here I am, writing about writing. I’ll keep it as short as my beginner writing skills allow me to, I promise.

My close friends might know this, and everyone else might not, but could have guessed it: I had been thinking of starting a blog for almost two years.

The reasons for wanting to start blogging were utterly unremarkable:

All the cool kids on the developer web do it

The web is full of really interesting blogs that let you:

  1. Get cool content and perspectives on all kind of topics related to the industry. It makes you think that starting a blog will let you share your opinion and connect you to both like-minded people and reasonable discussion.
  2. Find informal tutorials and guides for topics that are a bit out of the ordinary: by focusing on a very specific use case, and unlike reference documentation, they often touched on nuances and on the unexpected issues of a certain solution. I also wanted to share the cool quirks of the technical problems and solutions I encountered.
  3. Had their own flare of personal brand or personality: the relationship is entirely parasocial, but you feel a connection to the author’s personality.

Even without these feelings being mixed in, I also noticed that I often knew names of people that wrote often about certain topics, and associated them to a degree of expertise. This aspect leads us to the next reason:

It’s a content marketing strategy

Another reason I wanted to start the blog was a more practical one, which was to start putting my name out there as a professional in the industry. The reality of our world is that we will need to sell something to survive, so we’d better plan out how we want to market ourselves. I feel the need to cultivate an image of competence (hopefully reflecting the reality of being competent) to make sure that if work for others they will see me as worthwhile for the team and deserving of compensation, or, if I ever ever start a business, being able to project my personal branding into an image of quality for the product. Blogging made sense to me as the more straightforward way to put out content to build up that branding.

I wanted a coherent, shareable, durable, copy of my thoughts

One thing that happens often to me is that I think of something, I want to tell someone about it, and I get bogged down communicating it. Often it happens because I did not realize I had taken some mental shortcut to ground my conclusion, had disconnected thoughts that contradicted each other, or did not know how to organize those thoughts. Writing things down then helps me think through them with rigour and be more coherent.

The other thing that happens was having the same conversation over and over with different people, repeating myself, or worse, making slightly different points. I wanted a shareable record of those thoughts I had, so a notebook was not enough. I needed something that I could message to someone and say “read this” (such as website!).

Finally, I wanted to make sure that those thoughts were easily found and were durable. This ruled out just making LinkedIn posts, since they would have poor discoverability and searchability, and a blog seemed the best option for that.

Which brings us to the roadblock ahead:

Not-in-House Syndrome: The #1 Dev Blog Killer

This is the thing that blocked me for two years: wanting to blog for the sake of blogging, and thinking “I have to make my own personal everything”. It starts with the easy things: get a domain, pick a name. Then eveything breaks down. How far do I want to customize my blog? Do I use a custom theme for a static site generator? Do I need a content management system? Should I write my own logic for routing? Do I deploy on Netlify with Gatsby? Do I run Ruby on Rails on Heroku? How do I want it to look.

To make myself clear: if you want to implement you blog without writing, you will get bogged down in the minutiae. This is especially true if you can’t design for sh*t, like us backend folks, and/or if you do not even have content yet.

The book Atomic Habits by James Clear, regardless of your opinion on its methods, validity, et cetera, got at the very least one thing right: you will not pick up a new habit if you do not make it easy. And this insight was what made me finally able to start a blog.

Previously, I had tried using half a dozen different frameworks, went as deep down as to wanting to just write it as simple HTML files and a CSS sheet, and the same thing always happened: I had no content, and so 1. I could not ever publish it and 2. I lost interest in it within days.

Last week, I was reading a bit, I had just implemented a pattern that I thought was cool in a codebase’s mock data generators, and thought to myself “I could just write about it”. And so I did. Finally, my first blog post ever went online.

Which brings me to my solution to this problem:

Just write something

If you want to start your blog, you just need content. Literally everything else comes naturally afterwards, if your goal is just to get some text online. Seriously, if you have an idea for a blog, just write the text you want to share down, even if it takes 1h30 to write, like this one is.

The moment you have a text, be it in your notes app, on a Google Doc, or as a markdown file, everything afterwards becomes much clearer.

If you just want to share it, you can just paste it in a social media platform, on Medium, or literally anywhere else.

If you want to control your site like I did, but everything else seems too complicated, just get a SSG and the simplest theme possible, like I did with this blog, Hugo and PaperMod, and publish it ASAP. If you feel the need to customize later, you will have the urge to do it and can do it knowing that at least your stuff is already online.

If you still want to have everything yourself, you will finally have a reason to actually do it. The content is there, and you will feel the need to finish it and put it online.

Then just keep on writing. The content is what brings people over, not the blog’s tech.