The corollary is that if you find that post, say something. Drop the author a note, leave a comment. No one else does. For every YT celebrity, there are thousands of people posting good content on the internet and not knowing if it's being seen or appreciated by anyone.
That's an excellent point! Every author needs to know they're not posting into a void.
100 upvotes, if I could. There is too little positive feedback in peoples' lives, if any. For this reason, I habitually cold email people who's stuff has moved me in some way (think, feel, pause etc...). Universe knows, I need it too :D So I put a "standing invitation" [1] front-and-center on my site, copying Derek Sivers and patio11. I get maybe a handful of "hello from an Internet stranger" emails, but every time it makes my day / week / longer if the conversation rambles on languidly. Email is so great for slow-mo thoughtful banter.
[1] https://www.evalapply.org/index.html#standing-invitation
The ~3 times this has ever happened to me, it made my week. Cannot recommend enough.
(Just to say that I went to your profile to check out your writings but found no link!)
A guy posted about how to fix a broken car socket (cigarette lighter or whatever you call them) on a 1999 Honda Civic. Apparently there's little... Transistors or something under the glove box. Never knew they were there. It was like a 50 cent fix. Would never have known if this person hadn't posted. I did drop him a note of thanks
Fuses not transistors.
That sounds right. Couldn't remember
I did this recently when a blog post described the exact, very niche issue I was having with a production server. This post described the symptoms of the issue clearly and included a flow-chart of required fixes. There was no preamble, just clear guidance. It was more an incident management manual than a blog post, and it saved me a lot of Googling under considerable stress.
I sent the author a quick thank you, explaining how it helped me in my hour of need. Exactly as others have said here, it goes a long way to making the effort of blogging worthwhile!
There was a blog I followed and really admired ten or fifteen years ago. One day I was reading one of his posts and in the middle of it was an exuberant note of thanks for an article I wrote doing a close read of Ruby's TSort package.
Super niche, mostly irrelevant to all but a vanishingly small number of people, and yet I had proof that someone I admired found it useful.
It's been years, and it still makes me smile when I think of it.
You never know what impact you might make on others.
One of the reasons I avoid commenting on YouTube whatsoever is the risk that an automated filter flags my comment and then nuke the whole account.
This idea seems similar. I have some accounts on social media that is being used for read-only. That's unfortunate reality.
This idea is not related to avoiding commenting. The Author is suggesting you comment.
I understand that. I'm just saying that this is the reason I avoid commenting even when I want to follow author suggestion. I agree with the author.
I reached out to a person on Gemini in 2021 and we've spoken basically every day since. You never know what kind of connections are out there unless you try.
I’ve gotten a few emails about my blog and without exception they’ve all made my week.
Case in point
Total party skills, arguably the most balanced astute commentary of current events… definitely that I’ve come across. Hidden behind a game master facade.
This is the philosophy I use for my TIL posts - if something took me a few hours to figure out despite searching for a solution first it's a very strong signal that it is worth writing about.
Here's my most recent one, about using a Tailscale exit node to proxy scraping traffic from GitHub Actions: https://til.simonwillison.net/tailscale/tailscale-github-act...
The article says as much!
> Simon Willison is the master of this and even has a subdomain devoted to his
Whenever I fix something or struggle with an issue I ALWAYS write myself a blog post and make sure to cram in the exact errors/SEO Keywords I searched for while trying to glue together a solution.
Two days ago, I was looking on how to get Gamescope working with a new computer on NixOS. I searched around, and found a Reddit post about it [1], found that they had a Github Gist attached to it, and then realized that I was the guy who posted it. I had completely forgot that I had done this work already.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1dahr3g/steamos_base...
That and finding the answer on StackOverflow that you wrote
My most useful stack overflow answer is one where I barely knew what I was doing (something back in MVC.net) and while I managed to fix the problem, which was the same as the one asked about, I didn’t understand any of the marked “best answers” or how they were relevant, so i wrote out how I’d fixed it in “I clicked here and typed this to match that” terms. Much later I knew enough to realize that of course my answer was exactly what those other answers were saying to do, but mine still got buckets of votes from all the other poor folk googling without having yet understood the bindings and views and magic connections between pieces that Visual Studio was making.
Something I wish I had done more. You think you don't need to make a note because it's fresh in your head at the time, but years later, even the context is gone. Expecting to remember arcane solutions to things you do rarely is unrealistic. I've gotten better but still have a ways to go. One thing that removes the barrier is to just have common log to put everything, perhaps with some tags, so you can quickly open it and type your thoughts when they're fresh, without having to worry about packaging it just right.
That's what I do too. The last post I did was trying to figure out how to replace the battery in my baby monitor.
https://www.michael1e.com/how-to-replace-the-eufy-spaceview-...
I also do this.
Still don’t know how to respond when i get fucked by LLM authoritarians (Grok, ChatGPT, etc.).
They don’t give the traffic back / incentives or even cite us as the source. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Same with posting questions - try to include all the things you searched for, so when it gets answered, the next person can find it.
somehow i can't get myself doing this.. publication stuff.
There are tons of things i have (accumulated) to say, but something is stopping me. Probably the current not-easiness of it (plain html isn't that fun), and the need of investing yet-another-little-of-myself to make-that-easier (software? it's what i breathe), and some kind of tiredness of it..
There, i said it. Maybe one day.. i will.
have fun
I'm imminently posting one such Web page, which took me many person-days to figure out, when I couldn't find the info.
Posting is actually delayed because I'm experimenting with how to do this more sustainably than I have in the past. Which means generating dollars somehow, and also making it harder for "AI" crawlers and services to rip off everything. :(
This hits a nerve and my urge to do that gets bigger and bigger by the day. I JUST have to do it (tm).
Recently I have been playing around with the Microchip PolarFire SoC[1] and as I already know, there ain't __that__ much resources available when it comes to FPGA design. But oh man, microchip is a whole other level than Xilinx/AMD or anything Lattice/open source tools related. I fought so many battles to get things done and I finally have some kind of a workflow going and understand the chip. I really like it by now (if anyone wants to dive into hardware-software-codesign, it's a nice budget chip to do it with). But after every battle I fight, I think to myself: "God damn, I should write this one down on a blog somewhere. If I can only help one person in the future, even if it's myself, then that's a huge win". But the lazy (and kinda scared) me won until now.
What if I don't write good enough (because english is not my mother tongue)? What if all I write is obvious to everyone else and I am the only one fighting? What if a friend will see this somehow and laugh at me?
It doesn't matter. I should do it, because I feel like it. Thank you for this post, OP.
- [1] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/development-tool/mpfs-disco-...
Edit: My last few words reminded me of CHarles Bukowski's "Roll the dice". Maybe I should remind myself of that a bit more often: https://hellopoetry.com/poem/68266/roll-the-dice/
I think that perhaps the most important part of this is that if you write the post you wish you'd found, chances are you'll find it useful again at some point in the future.
So much of what I write has proven itself useful to me again even years after publication. Adding search functionality to my site and including my microblog posts there has extended this further.
I'm working one of such blog posts as we speak. Past few months I've been purely publishing articles in my domain (Kubernetes) that go really deep into things that I've discovered the hard way, or code walkthroughs in OSS codebases.
> Past few months I've been purely publishing articles in my domain (Kubernetes) that go really deep into things that I've discovered the hard way
Could I ask for a link?
Looking through the submission history of that user yields https://ahmet.im/blog/index.html
Well done. Great you've got time for that. Thanks.
These days, there is always someone who has already written what I wanted to write. So, I write my own version. In the early days, most of my blog posts were inspired by questions on public forums. I reply there and then write a blog post, and then, I just point them to my blog. The articles from my blog from the early 2000s reflect all of that.
For instance, the article on how to open a browser full-screen from IE5 was a roaring success. https://brajeshwar.com/2002/ie-50-full-screen-from-itself/
I like this idea - even for little tips I find along the way when trying to solve challenges.
But then the new issue I have is I end up cluttering my blog with these lower effort posts that get in the way of the longer pieces. How do others solve this? Like separate feeds or something?
Here’s an example: https://varun.ch/posts/macos-keyboard/ I don’t think this should be among by “posts” but do others have a “firehose” section or something, for random thoughts and tips?
I think this is good use for microblogging platforms like Mastodon and the others, to which you can link to from within your blog. If you've written a lot of mini-posts[1] that fit a theme you can edit them together into larger blog post eventually. If you have complete control over your website you could even feature some of your most recent or popular mini-posts on your front page.
[1] I don't know what the best term is to describe theses kinds of posts that distinguishes them from long form blog posts. What do people do on Mastodon--toot? I'm just going with mini-post for now.
Always good advice to put back into the world to help those who come after. I've made a few videos in the past to explain things I know others struggled with in Godot and every time someone finds one of them and thanks me for making the concept of the video make sense it puts a smile on my face.
amen, my own journey/version here. most powerful career insight ive ever had, when reflecting on why my career transition from finance to tech went so well. https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public
Trying to teach others will help you a lot in mastering a subject.
Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange used to be such a good site for this - I'd just ask the simplest kind of question on how to do it and then answer it myself a few days later. It was great because SO would show up on a search; it ranked well on Google unlike personal blogs and public wikis. As a bonus, other people also maintain the answer and it stays up to date.
This was one of my favorites: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2757107/developing-for-a...
It was a checklist and people would just add on to the checklist as things changed.
Alas, it's not practical to do this anymore, because you'd just get downvoted to -13 under the current administration. Don't build atop other people's platforms, I guess.
I post the occasional Medium article about technology and DIY projects.
I wrote a post like this once - an article I wish someone else had written and posted. It has hundreds of views - a steady dozen or so a week. It's too bad I don't have more content like this where I figured out a thing which was largely undocumented.
This echoes well. The most popular posts on my blog are things where I wrote things for myself (e.g. reflections on my career), rather than trying to orient them for an audience or maximum clicks.
I haven't blogged in quite awhile, and I don't know why. I've done what everyone has done and started five or six blogs and then abandoned them, but never more than that.
Anyone who has seen my HN history knows that I'm not averse to writing out large quantities of text spouting out my dumb opinions on things, and I don't think I'm a terrible writer or anything. I think at least some of my longer HN comments could be converted into blog posts with just a little effort, but for whatever reason it has never really stuck with me.
I guess part of it is that HN is a lot more conversational, or at least when I write a comment here, I'm writing it either a) in response to someone or b) with the expectation that someone might respond to me. For whatever reason, having that bit of social interaction (with the relatively technical and educated audience of HN) is enough to lower the barrier for me to write something.
I think if I already had a blog that was relatively popular, I'd also find it easier to get into the mood to write a more organized blog post, if for no other reason then there would be an automatic minimum-interest in whatever I write and then it would feel less like I'm shouting into the void.
Just cut and paste whatever you wrote in comments into a blog. it'll help you get over the mental hump.
julia evans is really good at doing that. can recommend her blog, both for knowledge and for inspiration: https://jvns.ca/.
This is the only reason I have a blog. It's letters to myself when I find one of those in-the-gap-between-systems problems and want to describe how to fix it.
I have different types of posts to support different habits of blogging.
1. First, I have classic essays that I wrote by hand. I'll ask an LLM for thematic flow or grammar checking, but it's my thoughts. It's more sporatic, but they're things I'm compelled to talk about and think deeply about. Example is on how visual programming is stuck on nodes-and-wires. https://interjectedfuture.com/visual-programming-is-stuck-on...
2. Next, I have posts that I write on a schedule. These are what I call lab notes, which I'll post every monday no matter what. These are easy to write because I just recount what I've been doing the past week and what challenges and wins there are. This exercises the muscle of posting something. Example is this past week on type checking https://interjectedfuture.com/lab-note-60-writing-words-and-...
3. I do write TILs, though these don't occur for me nearly as much at the moment, due to the type of work I'm doing. It's like my own stackoverflow, I guess. Example is on the common footgun of useEffect. https://interjectedfuture.com/today-i-learned/til-message-ha...
4. Lastly, I have posts where I had conversations with LLMs in depth on a niche topic that I think others would find interesting. If it's a back and forth, at the end of the conversation, I'll have it write a blog post based on what I thought the salient points were. If it's deep research, I'll just post that. I mark it clearly at the top it was LLM generated. The generation can be good enough that it's worth the post for humans to read. But also, in the hopes that the next model might pick it up, as an indication of what's good an interesting. It's basically one single sample eval based on my taste of what's good. Example is how algebraic effects are handled across Koka, Eff, OCaml, and Unison: https://interjectedfuture.com/algebraic-handler-lookup-in-ko...
All's to say to people, there's different modalities of blogging. If you pick just one, you might feel pressure to write when you have nothing to write. But if you don't write you don't get in the habit, which is why I do the lab notes. It makes me post even if I don't have anything to say, or the time to say it.
I wish I had done this starting a decade ago. Now, with AI, it feels pointless. These powerful AI tools have slurped all of that valuable information up while simultaneously removing all value from actually posting any of it going forward.
If your target audience is yourself, there's still plenty of value in writing it down.
Wait long enough and there will be situations where you did something in the past that works really well, but you can't remember anymore what you did or why you did it. An AI doesn't really help you then.
LLMs aren't good at everything. If you're on the edge of knowledge and taste, it's very apparent. Might as well write it down.
Not at all. That's like saying it feels pointless to write a blog if there's search. Like gwern says, lots of people are probably going to be looking for information through LLMs in the future. If you don't write what you're thinking, you'll likely be invisible or illegible to the future. Might as well write it down.
If you're writing to help altruistically, then AI shouldn't matter.
If you want recognition, then writing tech articles is a difficult path to help you gain status or become known.
My guess is that you just dislike helping the enemy. I'm often more driven for negative reasons than I am for positive ones.
Three reasons to write regardless of whether AI slurps it up.
1. You will learn more, even when you think you know everything there is to know about the topic.
2. You can point to a thing you personally created. It's nice to be discussing a technical topic and be able to say, "Hey, I actually wrote an article about that, I'll send you the link."
3. AI might slurp up some of what you write, but it's a blurry filter over information. Your unique writing, details, and perspective are your own.
Finally, it can be fun or rewarding in the same way drawing, painting, or any other creative act can be. If it's not, then channel your effort into something else.
seriously, just ignore the AI, and create the human internet you want to see.
How have they done the second?
It turns into write the messages/prompts to get the answer you wish you’d received and put it somewhere where it can be used to train the AIs and in the meantime searched by humans
Blogger beware: You can be a victim of your own success if you're not careful.
Every time I follow this sort of advice, whatever I write inevitably becomes immensely popular and I end up hearing from a lot of people that whine loudly about my furry blog having furry art on it.
(Most recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43105421)
It's exhausting and if you don't reply on news sites, they'll send you social media messages and emails too.
And if you'd like a poignant example of a time I followed this sort of advice, I wrote this one after I failed to understand why some applications were using HKDF different than I intuited it was meant to be used, and a formal methods guy had to explain it to me because I was asking very loudly. It has since been cited by the Python cryptography library docs: https://soatok.blog/2021/11/17/understanding-hkdf/
Geez, shove it down my throat, why don't you?
I'm free all w--
People will complain no matter what you do...death, taxes, stupid people on the internet.
You're not wrong, but I felt these words of caution are something anyone should be aware of should they pursue TFA's advice.
If you're doing it for intrinsically valuable reasons (i.e., for yourself), wonderful!
But if you're doing it to try to overcome writer's block or establish themselves as a recognized name in a community, there are downsides that people don't tend to talk about much because they might sound ungrateful (especially if they financially benefit from their popularity). I, individually, have no such monetization incentives at play.
It’s a rush to feel appreciated when somebody takes the time to enjoy your craft - be it writing, cooking, or developing a tool. It’s deflating to put something out there and it simply disappears into the ether, never to be recognized nor celebrated. 10 years into my Medium account I’ve experienced both and at this point, I simply can’t quit because writing is my journey and audiences are fickle. So be it, such are the terms and conditions of the craft.