Hacker News Reader

Comment by dikei | Hacker News Reader

I've tried to create a tech blog for a long time. But because I'm quite OCD about my writing, it took ages to create a post.

In the end, writing became such a chore that I stopped altogether.

View on HN

My blocker was in infra shaming (from myself). I had started on WordPress years ago on a t3.micro instance, and all was well. Then I wanted to self-host since I have a substantial homelab and at the time, was an SRE. But I knew that my K8s (k3os technically) cluster wasn’t great, and I wasn’t using Helm correctly, and… all of this made me think I had to get everything perfect, exactly how I wanted it, before I could use it for publishing tech opinions.

A few weeks ago I found out you can have GitHub Pages with a custom domain, so I extracted my posts, converted them to Markdown, and now I run Hugo. So much easier, and I don’t fret about what imaginary people might think about me.

What made you stop fretting about that? Did you make the GH-hosted blog anonymous?

Nope - you’re welcome to see it if you’d like (but there’s a huge gap in content, the only new stuff isn’t pure tech, and I make no guarantees about the accuracy of the older content) - it’s my username.dev

It was purely self-loathing/projection (idk, not a psychologist), where I was convinced that if _I_ thought my setup was bad, then surely others would judge me and ignore the content as well. I have no idea how I snapped out of that absurd belief, but I’m happy I did, because I really enjoy writing.

Read the first couple of posts and found them very insightful. Thank you for leaving them public.

I have this exact same problem.

Went from GHP/Jekyll (2012), to GHP/Hugo (2013), to GHP/Hexo (2014), to headless WordPress/React (2017), to Ghost (2018), to Netlify CMS (2019), to Vercel/Gatsby (2020), to Astro (2021), to custom Elixir/Phoenix (2022), to Micro.blog and Substack (2023)... (dates are approximate within ~6 months)

I'm still debating what to do next. My motivations go back and forth between "learn some new tech" and "write the dang thing".

Either way, I'd really like to stick to something for more than a year. Ideally I'd separate my "site" and "blog".

I’ve had similar issues and recently made a big step forward by doing one thing: I publish my posts but don’t list them and block search engines from scraping /posts via robots.txt.

It’s not a safe way to hide content by any means, but is just enough to stop myself from worrying about what others still think about my writing. I can still share links with individuals if I want.

I have been trying to get myself to write more for twenty years and this was the first thing that helped.

I write a lot but don't publish anything anywhere. It's kind of like that bo burnham song "look who's inside again". I feel like when I share anything I think, no matter how revised, detailed or not, whatever advice followed, all I find is "another reason to hide again". feeling like having too much to say is a lot like having nothing at all to say in that it amounts to the same thing.

I don’t really worry about it. Consider so many people spend a lot of resources and strategies to SEO optimize, our hobbyist blogs are probably showing up in the 20th page of some random search.

Same. I had a blog for awhile (on blogger lol), and a number of posts on early iOS programming. Some posts had a lot of hits and positive comments. The problem was that every post took me forever. I was so worried about having even a minor error that the stress caused me to stop.

I'm older now and care less about what people think and have more wisdom that the vast majority don't care about what I think, so maybe I'll start up again. It would be fun to share my ~25 years of tech stories and experience for at least myself.

I was like that, assuming people will just throw barrages of virtual tomatoes to my blog posts, then I read a quote from a famous writer: "Your first draft will always be bad. Just revise" (or something similar).

Then I started to write my drafts when inspiration hits without thinking and stopped the moment inspiration ran dry. Then revising/extending as I feel like it. I publish the post the moment it feels complete. The result is https://blog.bayindirh.io.

The gist is, I write about what I want, for myself. It's out there and available. I also submit to here and send to a couple of friends. If I get feedback, that's nice. Otherwise, eh.

Give it a try. There's no need to be blocking yourself out of something you might enjoy.

My problem is time and being in the right headspace. Between family, work, and a plethora of other hobbies that get neglected, not to mention often crippling anxiety, it is astoundingly difficult for me to work up posts on my project blog simply because I am either too busy or not where I need to be mentally to write due to general and pervasive exhaustion. I have been trying to kickstart a space where I can talk about my projects and repairs/restorations for years, but never quite found the secret to balancing life and writing.

I have the same problem, but I also have a suggestion: write down the stuff just for yourself. Like personal notes. Don’t think about publishing it anywhere. For me, this works really well for learning purposes. Although I would also like to publish some stuff, some day, maybe…

I'd say that is mainly an issue with people, they think it needs to be published.

Writing becoming a chore is wrong use, because one should not write for "writing" and article we discuss here has nice points on practical use of writing for other means than simply "writing".

This was the solution that worked for me. I started writing things on Notion or Apple Notes because it’s just always at hand. I also started to use Microsoft To Do to constantly write down random ideas for things to experiment after I read a post about training our minds to constantly come up with new ideas to experiment with MVPs.

An old manager of mine introduced me to the concept of ”not letting perfect get in the way of good” (presumably from the aphorism "Perfect is the enemy of good"). Nobody else knows what your version of perfect is. Your post/blog/PR etc. is ready already.

I’m having this problem now. I want to publish a post about recent months of progress on my project, but while writing it I found the solution isn’t complete and still has some flaws, so I feel I must put some more weeks of work into the code first before I can publish the post…

I’m trying to practice writing “this doesn’t work yet” acknowledging in the post that it isn’t fully done, and publishing the bloody thing. We will see how it works next time I sit down to write!

Same. I want to limit myself to creating posts that are 2 or 3 paragraphs long, but I find that when I start, I expand and clarify so much it becomes another long post.

I always need to have an entire free afternoon to write some prose.

Huh. I've always felt that my posts aren't big enough to warrant publishing. I've been working on a few posts for weeks now but it still feels like they're too insignificant to publish.

Are long posts frowned upon?

Tweets get published, your posts are long enough.

Are you expanding and clarifying for yourself or for others?

The problem will be a useful differentiator to other tech blogs.

Depth. Depth would be a useful differentiator. I need a few thousand words that actually teach me something, not three paragraphs that vaguely gesture in the direction of an idea.

THIS. My favorite example is Jeremy Cole’s blog [0], especially the stuff on InnoDB. You want to take a deep dive into the murky internals of MySQL? This is it. Tons of other stuff as well, but those are my favorite. He wrote tooling to visualize .ibd files FFS.

[0]: https://blog.jcole.us/

+1. Jeremy is well-informed and excellent at explaining technical topics. He and others like Jeremy Zawodny were major forces for good in the MySQL community back in the days of MySQL AB.

I agree. Depth creates much more evergreen content than just "news commentary" or similar.

A workable trick is to write smaller blog posts, come back and add/edit later ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com