

Protip: Write for you - bitsweet
http://coderwall.com/p/ckrpia

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brianwillis
I'm really of two minds about the write for you/write for an audience
argument. I started blogging early this year, and so far I've written and
published four posts that don't make me want to gouge my eyes out. That's not
to say that what I've written is especially good, just that it's passable.
When I started I was shooting for one post a month, so I'm obviously way
behind on what I thought was a conservative goal.

What surprises me most about the whole exercise is how overwhelmingly _bad_ I
am at writing. More than 80% of the content I've written has been thrown away.
If I wrote code like this I'd have been out of work long ago, but I just can't
bring myself to go on permanent record with half-baked poorly thought out blog
posts.

I hate to put this so bluntly, but many people out there lack this kind of
restraint. As a consequence, there's just a universe of truly awful writing
online. The Joel Spolskys and Steve Yegges are really few and far between.

So yeah, write for you, but if you don't mind, could you do the world a
service and write for the rest of us too? We'll all be better for it.

~~~
Smudge
I, too, feel like I'm just muddling through my first foray into a personal
blog. (For what it's worth, I found your four posts pretty interesting. Hadn't
heard of _Design for Hackers_ and I'm definitely checking it out now.)

I think the "write for you" advice is good, because it gets you through the
early stages of writing and posting content. This might lead to a lack of
restraint in some, but it reminds me that I don't need every post to be super-
insightful or essay-of-the-year worthy. I just need to write about what
interests me, which takes a lot of the pressure off.

~~~
brianwillis
You just doubled my traffic for the month.

------
hluska
A few years ago, I thought to myself, "Self, you haven't started a really
stupid business with a remarkably high chance of failure in a long time. Why
don't you start a magazine?"

I was bored, so I did.

Within a few months, I had founded a magazine. My co-founder and I
bootstrapped it, so we didn't have access to the highest caliber of writers.
Consequently, we did a whole lot of development work; taking writers with
passion and some technical flaws and working with them until they could bang
out some good quality content.

I learned something really valuable working with young writers. The 'write for
you' advice is great...to a point. If you really want to become a good writer,
you need to write for an editor. Find someone you trust and get him/her to
butcher your writing. Write for that person.

The problem with writing for yourself is that it is too easy to say, "well,
the audience didn't come because x." (where x != my writing sucks)

The joy of writing for a good editor is that you will improve faster than you
can possibly imagine. And then, you can say, "who cares about an audience, I'm
a better writer now."

You can become a great writer...anyone can. Hell, if you can write code,
you're already 95% of the way there. My email address is on my profile - if
you want someone to edit your stuff, send me some mail...

~~~
onewland
As a corollary, you don't know how bad of a coder you are until your first
thorough code review.

------
Alan01252
Protip: Don't track statistics on your blog.

Little controversial, but this is the first time in my life I actively care
for a blog I've created. And the reason? I don't care about the statistics.

Previously my main priority was getting traffic. I became obsessed with
looking at statistics to see how much traffic I'd gained. I spent far far too
much time looking at statistics, when instead, I should have been doing, what
I hope I'm doing now. Writing content that I will want to read again.

~~~
mnicole
Really great advice. I take too much consideration of my stats on other sites
and it really shouldn't be about that unless I'm in full-on sell mode, and
that isn't what most personal blogs should be.

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JamesLeonis
I write a personal blog because I want to get an idea out of my head. It's
almost a pathological need to put it to paper or bits, or else it festers
inside and distracts me from what I want to do. This post here is here because
of that need.

Other ways I deal with this need is carrying physical notebooks and a pen just
about everywhere I go. Sometimes I turn them into blog posts. Sometimes I turn
them into stories. Right now there are about six game ideas and four business
ideas in the notebook next to me, as well as dozens of proto-essays. My blog
likewise has almost twice as many "draft" essays than published posts.

This wasn't the norm for me two years ago. If you were to give me a page and a
pen then, it would be blank for months. I made a decision to make it easy and
effortless to write down ideas and thoughts. That meant carrying around a
notebook and pen to many places I went. I also started doing stream-of-thought
notes to try and jog my noggin when I was first starting out.

The takeaway here is to just get started. All my early stuff is garbage now,
but it served as a good first wave to get me in the habit of writing.

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swombat
Like everything else, this advice is highly contextual: in this case, the
context depends on where the writer is starting from.

The goal is to write things that come from the heart as well as the brain,
that leverage your passions and appeal to an audience, all at the same time.
In other words, the goal is, as usual, somewhere in the middle.

If your starting point is that you think nothing of your own passions,
interests, and write whatever you think will please an audience, then yes,
this advice is right on the ball for you: you should write for you, because
it's about you.

If, on the other hand, your tendency is to boldly write what you care about,
following your passions and interests and not giving the audience much of a
second thought, then the opposite advice applies: write for your audience -
because it's about them, not you.

Of course, "write for both the audience and yourself" doesn't make such a good
sound bite...

I'm reminded of a quote, by Niels Bohr, I thin, which said that the opposite
of a Deep Truth is another Deep Truth...

~~~
OJ
I agree with your points. It is hard to make something this small have meaning
across the board. This is part of the reason why I targeted the thought at
tech blogging in particular. This net may also be too wide, but in my opinion
the point holds when it comes to that type of writing.

------
mike-cardwell
I have a few self imposed requirements for anything I post to my tech blog
(<https://grepular.com/blog/>)

1.) Only post stuff I myself would be interested to read if somebody else had
written it.

2.) Do not force myself to post simply because I haven't posted in a while.

3.) Do not simply regurgitate stuff I have read elsewhere.

A lot of articles on tech blogs violate rule #1 and the _vast_ majority
violate rule #3. Rule #2 seems to be violated by any site which is making a
serious attempt at making money.

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bedris
Although applicable to more than just tech writing, James Altucher offers some
interesting pieces of advice on becoming a better writer:
[http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/03/33-unusual-tips-to-
bein...](http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/03/33-unusual-tips-to-being-a-
better-writer/)

------
pestaa
I really like the short style of this post, but the only thing I kept in mind
while reading the piece is that it wasn't written for the author himself. A
nice morning read, by the way!

~~~
hkmurakami
It could surely be a post meant to remind the author himself that he shouldn't
stray from his path :)

~~~
OJ
That is definitely part of it. When I first started writing I needed to remind
myself of this quite a lot. Thankfully I haven't really needed to do that for
quite a while now. I enjoy writing and I do it when I can. The goal continues
to be learning with the added bonus of helping others along the way. It hasn't
ever been, nor will be, about traffic.

Cheers for the comment.

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mck-
I like writing, because of it structures my thought and forces me to think it
through thoroughly.

It is also greatly satisfying to share the lessons learned down the road.

So I don't think you shouldn't write for others. In the end, no one is Spolsky
or Yegges except for themselves, but we shouldn't underestimate the benefit to
the masses that may learn from you.

I am by no means an authority, but I get a few appreciative emails every so
often and that brings me great joy.

~~~
qznc
That reminds me that by sending an "appreciative email" you can make a blogger
happy with little cost. I should do that more often.

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mikejarema
One tip I would give developers/hackers who double as technical bloggers
(whether regularly or infrequently) is:

 _Write what you want to read (but can't find elsewhere)._

This simultaneously challenges you to learn the subject matter in depth, fills
a needed gap in content that other like-minded devs are probably looking for,
and may even yield a nice chunk of open-source or useful code snippets.

I use this strategy on my blog, albeit infrequently.

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sgdesign
Or just do both. You can have a main blog and a tumblr account, have a
personal blog and do guest posts on other blogs, or even write both kind of
posts on the same blog.

A couple years ago, getting RSS subscribers was the holy grail of blogging.
But these days, people find your content via Twitter or HN anyways. So there's
much less risk of losing your audience because you wrote a personal post that
didn't connect with your readers.

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damovisa
Nice post. :)

I tend to find writing (or explaining) for other people and doing it for
yourself blend. A lot.

The old adage that you don't truly understand something unless you can explain
it to someone else holds particularly true with tech writing. When I'm writing
to communicate something to someone else, I'm also helping myself understand
the topic better. It's win-win.

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mck-
The coolest thing I found about this link is coderwall.com. First time seeing
it, just signed up.. Looks like fun.

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baby
This works for any kind of writing. And it doesn't matter if you publish it or
not.

Well if it's good writing, or useful writing, it's better to publish it
because it might be useful for someone else.

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blacklooksgreat
Morrissey said.....

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFIanJS6fks>

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dvirsky
Alrighty then, keep your blog hidden from view and you'll be just fine.

~~~
OJ
At no point did I say "hide your writing". I think it's clear that the
sentiment of the post was not to hide the stuff that you write, but instead to
write for the right reasons. If you write for the purpose of pleasing others
you'll struggle. If you write to please yourself you'll be surprised just how
many others you please in the process.

