A lot of people have blogs these days. It’s basically never been easier to voice your opinions into the void that is the internet, and many platforms exist out there for different kinds of people to share what they have with the world.

Developer blogs are pretty different, though: it seems like we have so much passion at the start to make something (usually, it’s making our own blogs from scratch), but that quickly falters when it actually comes to writing the posts for our blogs. I’ve checked out enough dev blogs to the point where I now subtly have the expectation that they will more likely than not yield empty (or, at most, two to three posts, of which one is a “hello, world!”/“how I made my blog”/“my tech stack” post). I’m pretty curious to find out why this is the case, but of course, I don’t really have the people to hog and ask. If you’d like to share your POV, feel free to reach out!

I’m going on a half-assumption, half-personal experience kinda thing, but I think this happens because:

• There’s some pressure to maintain some formality and rough structure with a blog. It’s not a necessary thing, but it always feels like a blog post must have headers + pictures accompanied by captions and be peer-reviewed by a scientific journal or something. That’s why I find the idea of digital gardens so much more endearing because it tears down this expectation by having something that you’re expected to continually hone, develop, and nurture.

• We just don’t have the time. Developing can be a pretty mentally draining task, and I’ve had first-hand encounters where a day of work immediately turned my brain off for the rest of my evening. I always like to describe this as a “leave work at 6, stare at the wall until it’s 12, then sleep” kinda cycle, and it really does feel like that. If we spend a lot of our time (and mental resources) developing, what about when writing and sharing our thoughts with the world through our blogs?

• We’re still figuring out what we want to share. I’m personally at this weird stage with my blog that I’m not sure what to elaborate on. My current opinion goes back to that “screw it” mentality that’s been following from posts past, but I can imagine how many developers are balancing the line and are on the fence about whether they want their blogs to be about technical stuff (they can boost your portfolio!) or their individual experiences (feels more personal!).

Less perfection, more realness

The irony of putting a header here after the “expectation of headers” comment aside, I think there are a lot of subtle expectations when writing blogs. My perception of blogs comes from a mix of different places: news articles, official media releases from companies (like Apple Newsroom), and some Substack reads shared by friends. From all these, I had the idea that a blog is rigid with a lot of formality behind it. To write a post meant that you needed to have an infallible opinion that was well-thought-out and executed.

It doesn’t take you long to search “the history of blogs” to know that this really isn’t the case with blogs, though. If you really were to take Wikipedia’s word for it, blogs are supposed to be “an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries”. I think it’s worth re-evaluating whether my perception of blogs is really as they should be or not. After all, didn’t the internet come from everyone having their own corners of the internet?

When I think about writing a blog post, I think about the implications that may come about from my posting, even if there’s the irony that no one will really check out my blog and their posts anyway. And even if they did, there has been no reception (except for those from my friends at Hack Club!) about them, so it’s kinda like shouting into the void that is the internet. I think there’s some relief that can come about from that; and in a way, being more real and putting yourself out there by focusing less on perfection gives it all the more the personal qualities that blogs should (rightfully) have.

Don’t need to find the time, just do

Even as I’m writing this post right now, I’m setting aside time to write this. As in, I said, “Okay, I’ll spend about 15 to 30 minutes letting my brain do the writing as I stare blankly at a document filling up with words that I’ll eventually read through again later”. I think this can be a little restrictive; creativity can’t be forced, I learnt that first-hand, so why must we feel that that should be the case with the blog posts we write?

It’s worth something to ask myself and see how I can better write more fluently without disrupting my thoughts and ensuring that they get translated into words as best they can. Right now, I’m trying this idea out where I’d write down the basic points of what I want a specific post to cover, then when I have the time, try to elaborate more upon it. It takes away the stress of the expectation that you need XX time to complete writing a post, and you also aren’t forcing your brain to churn out words that can make pretty funny mistakes.

Less worrying, more writing

This ties into what I said earlier about being worried about the implications of my words. In a way, yes, we should be careful about what we put out on the internet. However, the internet is gigantic these days, and the people who come across these blogs and actively keep in touch with them and their updates are people who are pretty valuable to have. In a way, I’ve reframed my opinion about my blog such that it’s less “put it out for anyone on the internet to see” and more of “put it out there for myself and a select number of people to see”.

Sure, it’s still public, but the reframe kinda changes the way you write. You start to care less about writing to appease others and write in a way that’s more natural to you. Even now, though I’m starting to get used to it, it feels a lot more comfortable letting all the words flow out without having to stop and read through the past few words from time to time.

What’s the point of your blog, really?

If you have a pretty fancy schmancy blog out there, I think it’s worth asking this question. You must’ve created your blog for a particular reason — whether it was to share code snippets to the world, broadcast your experiences (because everyone has so many interesting and unique ones!), or just yap to the void — and I think we all can make our blogs feel truly personal and unique to us. We shouldn’t be all about rigidity all the time; some posts can really be laid back and diary-like!

I’m still figuring out the direction this blog will eventually head towards, but after looking back and what I’ve written, I’ll just likely take that with a pinch of salt. Instead of actively trying to navigate its way into being a blog of a specific calibre, I’ll just let it do its own thing. It almost sounds like a digital garden, which maybe I’ll write another post about in the future, too!

Thanks for reading as always. :)