Ask HN: How to recognise patterns and problems in everyday work to blog about? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to recognise patterns and problems in everyday work to blog about?

19 pointspoushkar9 comments

I feel I struggle to recognize things worth sharing with others, although I would very much like to blog (for many reasons: I believe knowledge should be free and shared, to develop/improve my writing skills, to get some visibility to my name to increase career possibilities).

Yet when I read blogs like Coding Horror, Joe Duffy's Blog, freeCodeCamp, etc I feel like I am not able to come up with anything of this quality and insight, although I work in an adtech company with quite some technical challenges.

I've came to realize it's a skill most bloggers have that I lack: being able to notice and find pieces of knowledge worth sharing in an every day job.

How do I develop this skill? Should I just begin blogging about whatever I do and then it will naturally come? Or should I apply some "techniques" to extract and distill what is the most important in what I do?

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Two methods I use:

1. I write about the mistakes I make. Mistakes aren't that hard to spot, if you're paying attention: "Oh crap, I wasted 3 days" or "oh crap, I shipped a bug."

I then try to figure out what the cause of the mistake was, and that's where patterns start showing up. But the mistake is a good starting point, which makes it all easier.

(Results at https://softwareclown.com).

2. Think about one specific problem. A lot. And write about it. A lot. A lot of what you write initially will be boring, unless you're better writer than I was when I started doing this. But eventually focusing on that one thing (in my case testing) will give you more insights, as you start seeing patterns.

Oh, and, read Gary Klein's book Intuition at Work aka The Power of Intuition.

I'll piggyback on this and add; writing about things I spend a lot of time figuring out. Like if some problem (programming related) you have doesn't have clear explanations available via the search engines of the day, jotting one down can be greatly appreciated[1].

[1] https://xkcd.com/979/

I remember I was looking for a way to fix something. So I googled and found an answer that just detailed everything I needed. I was blown away by how thorough it was. I said "I love you, stranger!", looked at the nickname, and it was me. I had a pretty big laugh.

The TL;DR is "input == output".

The key is to not spend time thinking about what to write, but instead constantly be doing things and writing about the process.

When you have a lot of input, you can produce a lot of output.

Trying to "invent" a blog post is a pretty bad idea. It needs to be based on a real experience.

I'm not at the Coding Horror level but I do post about once a week and have been blogging for ~2 years. Check my profile for a link to my site.

Identifying what's worth writing about is not a skill you have naturally, it's something you develop from practice. I know it sounds trite, but just start writing, and do it consistently, and you'll build the skill.

I've been blogging almost weekly for over a year. My first 5-10 articles garnered almost no interest; even now they have only a handful of reads on Medium. I was writing about jQuery tips for god's sake. But I eventually learned from my mistakes and now I have maybe 10 articles with more than 100 recommends on Medium, and I've had two articles make the front page of HN.

"...although I work in an adtech company with quite some technical challenges"

There is your topic. Tell us about the technical challenges that come with implementing framework X or programming language X in the adtech space. Make your writing exclusively about the space and consistently blog whether it's once a week/month etc but be consistent.

If you listen to the Software Engineering Daily podcast, for example, you will hear the main host Jeff Meyerson talking about various technical challenges associated with detecting bot traffic etc. Maybe write about that as well?

Hope that helps.

Document your pain.

Blogs tend to be at a level commensurate with the person writing the blog, there is a lack of good stuff from your average day to day devs point of view because those types of devs don't typically blog.

The dread of programming is always a good starting point, notice the patterns, make short notes, aggregate then combine into a blog post.

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