Rachel Kaufman: [00:00:00] Hey, code Word, what’s up? My name is Rachel Kaufman. I’m here at a conference about the web and content to try to convince you that you should be creating your own content on the web, on your own, technically focused step blog. I’ve been keeping a dev blog for some time now, and it’s been one of the best things I’ve done for my career.

Here’s the agenda for this short talk. One thing writing can’t do. Three things that we’ll do for you and how to get started today. This is me, by the way. I’m a full stack software engineer, self-taught work in the marketing technology space. A public speaker, a recovering journalist, and a mom to a Roomba was jealous of my coworker’s pets.

Play video games. Too many [00:01:00] probably, and I like to sell my own clothes. That’s me in a nutshell. Please check me out at LinkedIn. I’d love to connect. So, hey, don’t start a blog if your goal is to get rich. Now, everyone is a content creator these days, and a lot of people are trying to sell you a inexpensive thousand dollars course about turning your side hustle into a six figure passive income stream.

I’m not gonna be talking about that today because that’s not gonna happen. But the good news is the benefits you’ll get from your blog are things that will benefit you, whether you have a hundred readers a month, a million readers a month, or no readers a month. And that’s because writing helps you think.

Writing helps you remember, and writing is a social act. Writing helps you think. Research shows that the act of writing makes you smarter. Writing stuff down forces your brain to figure out what you actually think about. Something [00:02:00] to illustrate this, think of a tech concept that you understand well enough to use.

Maybe it’s even a concept you use every day. Can you explain that concept out loud to another person? Can you explain that concept to another person? Through writing? You might actually be surprised at how hard this is, even for something you think you know well. Writing is a great way to learn more about a topic.

I also like to choose topics that I don’t know a lot about to blog. This way, I get to learn something new and I get a new post out of it. Writing also helps you close your brain’s metaphorical browser tabs. If you’re thinking about a zillion things, writing forces you to deal with them sequentially, one at a time, but you don’t have to take my word for it.

The linguist, Dr. Steven Kramen once wrote this. When we write our ideas down, the vague and abstract becomes clear and concrete. When thoughts are on paper, we see the relationships between them and come up with better thoughts. [00:03:00] Writing, in other words, can make us smarter. Now, Warren Buffett agrees with him.

Some of the things I think, I think he said, I find don’t make any sense when I start trying to write them down. You ought to be able to explain why you’re taking the job you’re taking, why you’re making the investment you’re making, or whatever it may be. If it can’t stand applying pencil to paper, you’d better think it through some more.

Now, writing also helps you remember, do you remember what you did at work last week? What about last month? How about a year ago if you solved a tricky problem, but you didn’t write it down, did you really solve it? Will you remember how to solve it? Next time? People grossly overestimate their ability to remember things.

I probably can retrace my steps of searching for an answer. Maybe I did a couple different Google searches, talked to a coworker, and so on, but it’ll still be easier to get where I need to go next time. If I wrote down my specific self, [00:04:00] I refer back to my own blog posts all the time. Also, if you are blogging about things you did at work, and please get permission to do so if that’s necessary.

An added benefit of keeping a blog is that when it comes to performance review time. You’ve already documented some of the most interesting work you did in the last cycle. But Rachel, why do I have to post? Couldn’t I just take these notes that you’re talking about in my notes app or in my diary? You could, but writing is actually a social act.

You might not think it is because the stereotypical image of a writer is someone sitting alone in a cafe, scribbling in a notebook, but writing really is social. Once you start sharing your drafts with peers for feedback, sharing your finished posts with coworkers or on LinkedIn citing other writers’ posts in yours, you start to expand your network and you join a community of other writers.

And yeah, it’s true. The more you write and [00:05:00] post, the more you grow your personal brand. I’m skeptical of the idea of a personal brand. For many software engineers, it’s mostly hype. But it’s not hype that when you start writing and posting, you do join a community and your network becomes stronger. And again, these three benefits will help you no matter how much traffic you get, and honestly how perfect or imperfect your blog is.

If you’re a great designer, of course, feel free to come up with a gorgeous design for your blog. And if you’re a great writer, of course, feel free to write the best words that you can. If you’re not great at these things, you will inevitably get better with practice. But here’s the secret, even if it’s not perfect, you still get the benefits of clearer thinking, better recall, and joining this community.

You don’t have to be perfect to start. You just have to start. I hope this has convinced you to start a blog or at least think about it. So here’s some resources for getting started. [00:06:00] First, you’ll need ideas. Hopefully, this is the easiest part. You can write about things that you learned that surprised or interested you.

You can write step by step, step instructions for something tricky you solved. I personally love reading bug postmortems, and you can also just write about what you’re currently learning. It’s really okay to not have all the answers. Your writing is still a contribution and it might help someone out there.

You’ll need a place to host your words. Now I love Jekyll, which is a static site generator, but you could use any other static site generator. Jekyll has lots of support, works with GitHub pages right out of the box. You don’t have to know any Ruby in order to use Jekyll, as long as you could figure out some basic build tooling commands.

But you could also choose a static site generator in a language you’re more familiar with. Hugo is written in Go Pelican is in Python, eleventy is written in node js and so on. You can also use a hosted option such as Dev two Medium or Write Do [00:07:00] Ads Dev two lets you immediately join a community of other developers and you can connect an RSS feed from an external source if you like, that medium is also popular.

It’s free to start, and if you do wanna monetize your blog, you can pay them for the option of monetizing it. I do find this a bit silly, but you might find it valuable. I haven’t used write that as personally, and I’m a little skeptical of recommending something that doesn’t have a free option anymore.

But many devs I’ve talked to really do love it, and it’s federated if that’s something you care about. Images are great for illustrating points. You can also use them to grab a reader’s attention or just break up a long paragraph. Now, I like the site’s pixels and Unsplash, which have thousands of free images you can use.

Use a real picture, not a AI generated one, because those AI images all look the same. The noun project has thousands of icons and glyphs that you could use. Many of them are available for free with [00:08:00] attribution or very inexpensively, and you may wanna generate diagrams for some of your more technical posts.

Mermaid js is wonderful for this. It lets you use a markdown like syntax to create, get diagrams, flow charts, or timelines. You can integrate mermaid js directly into your workflow or you can just use for the Free Mermaid Live and save images, upload them later. Either way, it’s an incredibly useful tool.

I hope this has inspired you to get started. If not, check out these three wonderful blogs for more inspiration. And if you do start or restart a blog after this talk, please reach out and tell me about it. Would love to hear. Thanks so much. Code word. Have a great rest of the conference.