I've been running a blog at https://xeiaso.net for almost a decade now. It has been the single best decision I have ever made in my career. It allows me to skip technical screening interviews. It has made interviewing at companies _easy_ because I have _already proven_ that I understand what I'm talking about.
Learning how to write well also makes it so much easier to explain things succinctly, especially when working remote like I prefer to.
I've also been told that more junior people look up to me as a role model because of my blog, which is something that I am still getting used to, but I can accept.
Any tips for avoiding the urge to spend time setting up a fancy SSG and playing with that and never actually writing? I've done that a few times over the years...
I imagine the advice would often be "just write", which I do agree is fair advice, but wondering if you had any takes.
Every time I get anxiety, I write one blogpost. I get a lot of anxiety.
But really just work on writing or ideas for writing for half an hour every day. Even if you just write "I have nothing to write about today". Don't be afraid to just keep showing up.
The main idea for me was to just reduce the barrier to entry so that writing more was too easy to avoid. I already use Notion for taking notes throughout the day, so transitioning to also jotting down blog thoughts has been very easy and has increased the amount of writing that I do.
Bingo! Most of the tinkering is aimed at helping me make the site better. In essence, my site is a bunch of smaller projects that add up into one bigger project. If you end up doing something cool with your blog, while you're working on the true usecase (for example, my stream VOD page: https://xeiaso.net/vods) you can write about what you learned along the way (https://xeiaso.net/blog/hls-experiment and https://xeiaso.net/blog/video-compression).
Most of my site update posts are just my notes from tinkering with things turned into prose.
My way around just toying with site generators and actually write was:
Start by writing to yourself. I started with writing down ideas in a private markdown system. (I’d recommend https://obsidian.md today.)
I became less self-conscious about my target audience was myself. It also became easier to make assumptions about what they (I) know, which is still a game of “will I understand this in a year or two?” For me, writing about tech to a near-future version of myself was the beginning.
Another tip: You may be in control of your documents (you maintain them, not some online system you don’t own), but if you use someone else’s blog platform, you won’t have a chance to rabbit-hole the site making. There’s something liberating about only caring about the content, not the layout.
For some subjects, it helps to write under a pseudonym, because you can experiment with what’s on your mind and not how people will treat you based on what you say. I’ve wanted to write about things like pornography and past jobs (those are unrelated, hehe), but I don’t want to upset past colleagues or seem obsessed about pornography.
My recommendation would be to use either Jekyll or just go with Notion. I am allergic to setting up a bunch of stuff and just wanted to start writing. So I am using Jekyll's default Minima theme with some small adjustments, mainly to render MathJax and Mermaid diagrams in my posts. There was some initial hacking, but now I got it setup with a Docker devcontainer with VS Code, so it's as easy as pulling down the repository, and then starting to write.
I have only written one article at the moment, but I am glad I got started with it. I hope to keep adding to it over time and have a few articles in the works.
I second this. The only reason my blog is so complicated is that I get so much traffic that I have to overengineer it. Your blog doesn't need to be as complicated. Underthink things now so you can overthink them later. A friend of mine wasn't satisfied with Hakyll and ended up making her own thing on top of Deno and Fresh: https://twilightsparkle.fly.dev/, and she's super happy with that now.
Please keep at it with writing! It's a super valuable skill that so few people actually use. It really sets you apart in the job market and is so underrated from a professional standpoint.
I already had Caddy running for lunar.fyi and lowtechguys.com so it felt simple to just add some lines in the Caddy file and start writing words in .md files.
More junior person: have looked up to you since my first real job in 2019. Reading your posts on tarot debugging and plurality-driven development, and seeing you being so skilled and unapologetically /interesting/ was the first time I felt that "oh, there are actually people out there that I want to be like someday." Been reading ever since, thank you for all the posts!
Your blog always blows me away with how different and fun it is. I only dream of being that authentic online. I love the call-outs from the specific personalities. So great!
Assuming your threat profile allows for it, go for it! The main difficulty I run into is Hacker News being _incredibly toxic_ in the comments on my articles at times, especially if I talk about anything contentious or break from the intellectual mold that this site has. You'd be sad to know the number of people that accused me of being a [threat to children] because I'm openly queer/furry on my blog.
I would be sad to know the exact number but that immediately came to mind the first time I read an article from you. I desperately wish the world wasn’t like that and I’m sorry you have to deal with it.
>It allows me to skip technical screening interviews. It has made interviewing at companies _easy_ because I have _already proven_ that I understand what I'm talking about.
Can you please elaborate more on this? Do you just go "I made a post about it, go read?"
You'd be amazed. I get way more rejections than you'd be comfortable with because 2016 was a horrible year for me and I still have that year on my resume for logistical reasons.
That's really the heart of it. I've wanted to try using a sans-serif font like Inter, but I'm stuck in a pit where people expect me to use a monospace font and any attempt to move away from that means I basically change a huge part of the site's visual identity. I'm still trying to figure out how to find some middle ground because I am told that the monospace font is hard for people with dyslexia to read.
The Input font family by David Jonathan Ross focuses on monospace programming fonts, but it also contains a nice sans-serif font that kind of has a similar aesthetic. I’m not a typeface person, so I know I’m not explaining it very well. The homepage has tons of samples if you scroll down: https://djr.com/input
It’s one of my favorite fonts for code, but I also used Input Sans as a font for writing in Obsidian and Ulysses for a while. It was very good!
Learning how to write well also makes it so much easier to explain things succinctly, especially when working remote like I prefer to.
I've also been told that more junior people look up to me as a role model because of my blog, which is something that I am still getting used to, but I can accept.