To broadcast or not to broadcast

One of my friends, an outstanding programmer who likes to fly under the radar, frequently tells me he admires my “ability to broadcast”. I guess he refers to the fact that I’m keeping a blog, and that I’m not afraid of writing with transparency about my adventures in software engineering. To me, it all feels natural, so his comment motivated me to explain in more detail why I’m doing what I’m doing. Who knows, maybe it will encourage others to start “broadcasting” too!

The default— not to broadcast

No one is born broadcasting, except for good old Truman Burbank. Jokes aside, why would you ever put yourself out there on the internet? In my own case, at the beginning of my career I felt I didn’t have much to say online, other than answering a few Rust questions on StackOverflow. To me, programmers with a well-maintained blog seemed to belong to the world of rockstars, in a galaxy far far away from mine¹.

December 2017 brought me a surprise that changed my mind, though. Defying my custom, I wrote an article, put it online, submitted it to Hacker News and saw it somehow end up on the frontpage! That, in turn, sent thousands of readers to my blog and triggered a significant amount of enthusiastic comments. Maybe people did care about what I thought, after all…

Still, life went on without much writing, as you can see from this blog’s article history. In the end it took me five years to start blogging regularly, in December 2022. What was it that held me back for so long?

You see, writing a decent article requires lots of work, ranging from 4 to 20 hours (or more)! The necessary time investment was higher than I was willing to put into a blog, so I decided to concentrate in the little things of daily life: finishing my Computer Science degree, finding my first job as a software engineer, making friends in real life, spending time with family, reading interesting books, contributing a bit to open source, etc.

Was there fear, too? I don’t think so. While many people in our industry suffer from impostor syndrome, I’ve somehow been spared. Maybe part of the cure was seeing famous bloggers, such as the amazing Julia Evans, openly admit they don’t know everything. It’s nice when you are allowed to be human, isn’t it? I can’t imagine a life in fear of being exposed as a fraud!

Writing out of necessity

As I mentioned above, the end of 2022 marked an inflection point. I started posting about once a month and haven’t stopped since, even though each article requires hours of concentration and effort. Why the sudden change?

The immediate cause was necessity. As an independent consultant², I had difficulty establishing trust with prospective customers. Understandably, they wanted to know more about me and my work before involving me in a project. For instance, I claimed to be a proficient Rust developer with extensive open source experience, but the only way for people to double-check that was to tediously scan GitHub repositories. That’s why I ended up writing How I got involved in the Rust community, which came in handy every time someone wanted to know if my Rust claims were legit.

Necessity also poses a danger, though. You can imagine that, as a writer, expecting a return from your articles creates some tension. Do you really care about the people you are writing for, or merely about the benefits you can reap from them? Do you really care about the topics you touch upon, or are they just an excuse to grab people’s attention? You probably have come across authors that are out there purely to “extract value”, but have nothing of substance to offer. To them you are just a pair of eyeballs, a number in their analytics dashboard, a wad of cash to capture in their nets. And it shows in their writing!

Soul-infused words

From the very beginning, I made the decision to write with soul. I want to be me in my writing, not an impersonal entity extracting value at all cost. To the extent that written word allows, I want to even meet you in my articles, and want you to meet me. Human being to human being. Heart to heart³.

This approach has practical consequences. I want you to benefit from my articles, regardless of the return I get from them. Every time I write, I ask myself: would it be all right for this blog post to pass unnoticed? If the answer is yes, then I know I’m not writing merely to get people’s attention.

Does that mean that I don’t expect a return from blogging at all? Of course I expect it. With or without going viral, my blog slowly becomes a corpus of thoughts that I can share with others: friends who are interested in programming, random people on the internet who are looking for inspiration, prospective customers who want to assess my skills, even my future self. A benefit doesn’t need to be monetary to be real.

I consider myself lucky to have found a way to give something to the world, which at the same time benefits myself. I trust I’m striking the right balance here, because many people have sent me grateful emails and even more people have subscribed to the blog. That’s more than I expected, so thank you all!

Downsides… and positive side-effects

So far, the only downside to blogging has been unconstructive criticism, which you inevitably attract once your stuff gets exposed to a wider audience. Fortunately, most of the feedback is positive, so the negativity gets “drowned in abundance of good”⁴.

Sometimes unconstructive feedback does get to me and I start doubting myself: maybe I did write a low-quality article this time. In those cases, I reach out to good friends who know me well, and their opinion helps me get a more objective view of things (spoiler alert: the trolls are never right).

But let’s leave the trolls to their devices and move on to the positive side-effects I’ve encountered while blogging. I’ll illustrate them by means of examples:

• Enriched thoughts. After writing The undercover generalist, a good number of people got in touch to thank me or discuss the topic some more. I had videocalls with some of them and even ended up in an episode of The Changelog Podcast. As you can expect, this led me to further develop my understanding, which culminated in a follow-up blog post.
• Technical insights. My article on Using S3 as a container registry enjoyed several hours of glory on the Hacker News frontpage and triggered a lively discussion. Without knowing it, some commenters pointed me in the right direction to solve an obstacle I was facing. Thanks to them I found a way to substantially improve the original project.
• Meeting interesting people. This was partly mentioned in the “enriched thoughts” bullet point, but there’s one more thing to add. Not only have I met people online, I’ve even met people in person here in Amsterdam, after an email exchange that originated from something I wrote. Who would have thought of that?

What about you?

A wise person once said:

Great people who actually do great stuff need to become people who talk about it too.

Otherwise only those that master talking will get exposure.

I’m not claiming to be “great” or to be doing “great stuff”, but I do think my day-to-day experience as a software engineer is worth sharing. What about you?

I don’t think everyone should blog, mind you, but if you have something to share and you have a knack for writing… why not give it a try? Julia Evans has a nice summary of blogging myths, which might be a good starting point. Or you can drop me a line if you are into good old two-way human communication.