This is about what various people I respect have said about blogging. And how it impacted their lives. I wanted this to be a reminder for myself during the times when I stop blogging altogether and can’t remember why I should bother blogging.

I’ll add more to it as I come across or remember them.

Derek Sivers on writing

I spent this morning thinking about what doesn’t matter and what does. For me, writing is about the most worthy thing I can do with my time. I love how the distributed word is eternal — that every day I get emails from strangers thanking me for things I wrote years ago that helped them today. I love how those things will continue to help people long after I’m gone. - “OK Milt, I’ll start writing again”

patio11 on writing

On “Making your writing work harder for you”:

  • Don’t call your best pieces of content as blog posts. Call them as essays, or guides, or framework etc. A blog post has a date on it, and that devalues it over time unnecessarily. Use the blog for ephemera (upcoming conference dates, ‘latest news’ etc)
  • Build your best work into the core navigation of your site.
  • Have Concrete Goals For Everything You Produce. Put a Call To Action on them. Eg: Ask for their email to continue the conversation in exchange for a freebie that’ll offer them immediate marginal value.
  • Put these CTAs in your website’s sidebar, in the content itself as an understated callouts.
  • You don’t have to be “The Certified Expert” on the topic you’re writing about.
  • Align incentives with the conversation you’re going to have. This is about
  • Build internal libraries of your best work and use them for remixing. Use reader comments in podcasts, talk transcripts in emails etc.
  • Don’t just write for experts. Most of your audience is not an expert in the topic/market you write about. Instead write these:
    • High-quality beginners’ guides
    • Next steps for intermediate learners
    • Dedicated task-oriented content. “Make our business more secure” is not a task. “Configure a Cisco router to open up HTTP” is.

Simon Willison on blogging

Prolific blogger. he’s been blogging since 2002! Check this out, what he wrote in June 2002:

Blogging isn’t nearly as easy as it looks. After several days hacking around in PHP (I’m far too proud to use an off the shelf solution) I find myself confronted with a blank slate, and writers block has taken hold. A blog should be informal but informative, with each post hopefully adding a new angle to the topic in hand. I’m sure it will get easier as I go along

Now, at the end of 2025, he has over 7000+ articles on his site!

What to blog about:

  • TILs (“Today I Learned”) - write about things you’ve learned
  • Write about your projects - write about things you’ve built
  • “A big challenge with blogging is feeling the pressure to say something new and unique. So lower your standards on what to blog/publish”
  • “lower your standards! Waiting until a piece feels as good as you can get it is a recipe for an empty blog and a huge folder full of drafts. I try to hit publish while I am still unhappy with what I’ve written”
  • “I used to try and wrap every post up with a neat conclusion… my writing productivity went up a whole lot when I gave myself permission to just stop writing when I had run out of things to say!”
  • “I do a lot of writing on my phone - I’ll often publish link blog posts entirely form my phone, but longer form pieces always move to the computer to finish them up - the phone version is mostly scrappy notes. I use voice dictation (directly into Apple notes) on my phone a whole lot to capture ideas”

Here are some reasons to start a personal blog:

  1. It’s a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.

  2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they communicate well? If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn’t been updated in five years that’s still a big boost over candidates with nothing like that at all. In a competitive market that could be the boost you need to make it from the resume review to the first round.

  3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of “scaling” or “postgresql” and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.

  4. It’s a great way to help establish credibility. If someone asks you about X and you have a blog entry about X from five years ago you can point them to that.

  5. Building a blog is really fun! It used to be one of the classic starter projects for new web developers, I think that needs to come back. It’s a fun project and one that’s great to keep on hacking on long into the future.

Notably none of the above reasons require your blog to attract readers! There’s a ton of value to be had even if nobody actually reads the thing.

As a general rule, assume nobody will read your blog unless you actively encourage them to. That’s fine. What matters isn’t the quantity of readers, it’s their quality. I’d rather have a piece read by just a single person that leads to a new opportunity for me than 1,000 people who read it and never interact with me ever again.

If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable. I’ve been blogging since 2002 and most of the opportunities in my career came from people I met via blogging. Today I get invited to all sorts of interesting events because I have a prominent blog covering stuff relating to AI and LLMs.

But I do honestly think that a blog is a powerful professional tool even if nobody else is reading it at all.

If you want to give it a go I’ve written a few things that might be useful:

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