Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
4people
2024–2026years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A few chapters in, this is a great how-to book: A System for Writing (Bob Doto)
- Fiction: some more novels in Steven Erikson & Ian C Esslemont's Malazan Empire universe. These two produce some of the best fantasy I've ever read, and I've read a fuckton.
Non-fiction: A System for Writing by Bob Doto was pretty good. Also gave Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal a chance, but found it to be uninspiring, self-aggrandising drivel.
- TLDR: Yes, do this.
Back in 2006, I started my own little consultancy - I focused on Ruby on Rails (I was very early in that game - to my knowledge the first in the UK to specialise in it as a tech stack), had a lot of opinions on the Web 2.0 and tech scene more broadly, and very little cash to spend on marketing or any serious sales efforts. In short, my only option really was blogging.
My company website was basically my tech blog. Whenever people googled me or my company name (I had business cards, I did a lot of free networking events too), the blog would come up. Every piece of work I got came from that blog or word of mouth. Kept me going for 4 years until it was time to go do something else.
I think having a "personal website" in the form of a portfolio you add to and just link to from your CV might help more if you're a designer.
A blog, or at least a set of articles/editorials/deeper thinking pieces, will help if you want to showcase you're not just another monkey in a seat at a future employer as a senior developer. It will pay a lot more dividends if you want to go free-lance.
In terms of finding topics to write about, well, that's simpler than a lot of people make it. Whenever you're coding a side project, reading something on HN or elsewhere or watching a dev YT or whatever, ask yourself "what do I think about this?" and make a note in a dedicated note for ideas on your phone or in a notepad you keep nearby. If you consistently do this, after a week you'll have a list of lots of things you have thoughts about. Spot a pattern or theme? Cool, go write a blog post. Or two. Or five.
A slightly more formal method for this is called a Zettelkasten. A lot of nonsense has been written about this (and as a method, it's produced some awful writing from people who didn't understand how to use it well), but I think a good primer for this is Bob Doto's "A System for Writing" - it breaks down how to capture ideas, thread them together into something to write about, and how to then produce some good writing. It's quite lightweight once you make it a small habit, and I've been reading this recently and found it a lot more helpful than other books on the method.
In terms of tone - nerdy or professional - I would suggest you need to keep it authentic. Be you. However, be you in the context of you wanting to get hired, not you in the context of being out on a Saturday night with your friends.
The tone should not be interview formal where you're trying to be the most professional you that you can ever be, but the you where you are in the office talking about the thing you're talking about to a colleague. In fact, just imagine you're talking to some of your existing colleagues: what would you say to them about this idea? Perhaps get some of them to proof read your drafts before you post. Try not to be too negative, cynical or sarcastic (not just on your blog, in life in general), and you'll find people out there thinking "hmmm, maybe I'd like to work with this person some day".
- Warning: opening a can of worms. Ann Blair is a great source on general, but there are so many facets to this topic here's a list that I have read or am going to read.
* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen * The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin * Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair * Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account by Niklas Luhmann * Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design * Writing the Laboratory Notebook by Howard M Kanare * Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski * A System for Writing by Bob Doto * Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte * Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan * Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe by Alberto Cevolini * The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson * How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens * Filing and Database Systems by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle, Judith Scharle Greene * Organizing from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern * The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen * The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul * Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari * Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo * Filing by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle * How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess * A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham * The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll * The Medieval Scriptorium by Sara J. Charles * Chance Particulars by Sara Mansfield Taber, Maud Taber-Thomas * The Great Mental Models Volume 1- General Thinking Concepts by Parrish, Shane; Beaubien, Rhiannon * The Product is Docs by Christopher Gales * Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott P. Scheper Articulating design decisions by Tom Greever The Card System at the Office by J Kaiser * Systematic Indexing by J Kaiser * Commonplace Books and the Teaching of Style by Lynee Lewis Gaillet * Magic and hypersystems : constructing the information-sharing library by Harold Billings. * The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information by George A. Miller * The Commonplace Book by Elizabeth Smither * The Oxford Handbook of Expertise * Trees, maps, and theorems: Effective communication for rational minds by Jean-luc Doumont * Applied Secretarial Practice by Rupert P. Sorelle and John Robert Gregg * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * What is a Document by Michael Buckland * The Commonplace Book by Ann Blair * Make Better Documents by Anil Dash * A Core Calculus for Documents by Will Crichton and Shriram Krishnamurthi * The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams * Information by Anthony Grafton * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * Files: Law and Media Technology by Cornelia Vismann * Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge by Cyrille Martraire * Living in Information by Jorge Arango * How to Write a Technical Paper: Structure and Style of the Epitome of your Research† by Georgios Varsamopoulos * Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People by JoAnn T. Hackos * Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango * Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook by James (jamesg.blog)
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