Blogging For Your Career And Life

Writing in public is different from writing for yourself, and that difference is where the value comes from.

A résumé says what you have done. A blog can show how you think. A software developer who writes a clear explanation of a problem they solved — what they tried, why it failed, what eventually worked — is demonstrating reasoning, not just credentials. A teacher who writes about a concept they struggled to explain is doing something similar. Over many posts, a blog becomes a record of intellectual development that a CV cannot convey.

The writing discipline

Writing forces an honest reckoning with your own understanding. A concept that feels clear in your head often becomes less clear when you try to turn it into sentences. That difficulty is diagnostic, not a sign that you are bad at writing. It means your understanding has gaps that speech can paper over but prose cannot.

This is why I write about things I want to understand, not things I have already mastered. The act of explaining a subject in clear language is part of how I finish understanding it. Paul Graham, Derek Sivers, and Joel Spolsky — three writers whose technical blogs influenced how many developers think about software — each made a version of this point: writing is thinking, not just recording thought.

The compounding nature of a public archive

A blog has a property that a conversation does not: it persists. A post explaining how to debug a specific error, written in April 2020, can still be found via search in 2025 and solve the same problem for someone who was not yet searching for it in 2020. Technical writing compounds in a way that most professional output does not.

Scott Hanselman, a developer at Microsoft who has written publicly since 2002, has described his blog as the reason he got job opportunities he could not have predicted. He calls each post a “talk that lasts forever” — you give the explanation once and it keeps working. One post read by ten people who all needed exactly that information is more valuable than one post read by a thousand people who immediately forget it.

Platform and setup

The platform matters less than consistency. WordPress.com is the easiest start; self-hosted WordPress gives more control; Jekyll (which this site runs on) generates static HTML from Markdown and requires more setup but has essentially zero ongoing cost or security maintenance. Substack, which launched in 2017, has made newsletter publishing easier and added an email subscription layer automatically, which helps with distribution.

Using your own domain name — even just yourname.com — is worth the minor cost. Platforms change their terms, features, or disappear entirely. A domain is something you own and can point at a different host later.

What to write about

The most durable technical posts answer a specific question: how to do one thing, why something works the way it does, what you tried before the thing that worked. These are findable via search and they age reasonably well if the underlying technology is stable.

Personal posts and observations age differently — they become more interesting over time, not less. An honest account of how you thought about something in 2020 will be more interesting in 2030 than it is now, when the distance makes the perspective visible.

Traffic is not the right measure of value for a personal blog. A post read by ten people who each needed exactly that information is successful. The strange thing about blogging is that old posts sometimes matter more than recent ones. A technical note from three years ago keeps solving the same problem. A personal paragraph from five years ago reminds you who you were, which turns out to be worth something.