1) Blogging is like going to the gym except for writing: if I stopped, I'd end up an overworked, pudgy Japanese salaryman with no writing ability in English.
2) Blogging makes people say nice things about my ideas and that has always given me the warm fuzzies.
3) My decision to start a business 3.5 years ago was heavily influenced by accounts of success I had read from other people, and I wanted to leave similar encouragement.
4) My blog (or rather, a half-dozen handpicked articles from it) makes a far better case for hiring me than my resume or publicly available source code does.
I came here to say these exact things. Well done, and good luck!
Actually, I'd add a fifth item that is related to item 1:
5. Writing about things helps me clarify my ideas and stop hand-waving over important details. So writing makes me a better writer, and it also makes me a better thinker.
Related to this: Writing about something I'm not 100% familiar with forces me to learn more about it both breadth- and depth-wise. When learning a new topic, it is extremely helpful to write up a tutorial describing "how to" do this new thing. If forces you to understand before codifying an attempt to help others understand.
In my opinion, having a blog is as much about learning as it is about sharing information with other people. There's just something about putting your thoughts into words that helps you crystalize certain ideas that float around in your head.
For instance, if you read most of Paul Graham's essays, you'll notice that they probably serve more to teach him than to actually share things.
Plus, having people read your thoughts serves as a good way to gauge whether you're on the right track or not. If there's something wrong with your idea, believe me someone will let you know. This is why I sometimes submit articles to HN: to get an idea if what I'm writing is of any interest to hackers.
No. I don't have a blog because my perfectionism keeps me from even starting to write. I feel like if what I write isn't extraordinary, I have no business putting it out there at all.
How can you ever start writing something that's extraordinary if you never start writing at all? Do you really think Mark Twain started out writing Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer? It is a skill that requires effort to become good at.
Oh, I agree. You're absolutely right. I know that the perfect is the enemy of the good, but just knowing that doesn't make it easy to get over the psychological hurdle.
The same hangup keeps me from trying many of my software ideas. It's a feeling that I'm constantly learning to fight.
This is basically EXACTLY how I feel. I sometimes think about starting a blog, to showcase things I've worked on, or interesting things I've read about, or new things I've learned, but I often think that it wouldn't be original enough to warrant doing. The thing is, you don't know until you try...
You should read Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. She describes exercises to help get over these feelings, and gives you permission to suck. Or rather, convinces you to give yourself that permission.
1) I'm interested in the field of Computer Science (CS) and I like to write articles about various things I encounter and learn in this field. I'm also interested in other fields, but since I studied CS and work in this field, it's the one in which I'm "up to the mark". Well, that doesn't mean that I won't be writing articles about topics from other fields.
2) I love it when interesting discussions start around the subject an article of mine is addressing. For me, this point is one of the most rewarding things I get from blogging, since you can learn quite a lot of new things thanks to it.
3) I love to write tutorials, with the hope that somebody can benefit from them (hopefully in a good way :) I'm always happy when I read a comment from a user, whom a tutorial has helped in some way.
4) Since I read quite a lot of articles online, I use my blog also to post linkings to such interesting articles. I think the one or the other linking is appreciated by the few readers I have :)
5) It helps me to improve my language skills, since I decided to write the articles in English rather than in German. IMHO it's a good exercise.
I've been running it since 2002, and every job I've had since then has come about as a result of connections made through blog related activity. It's an incredibly powerful professional tool.
Yes. Because I decided that I don't have to be "a blogger." To elucidate: I like the idea of having readers and having an audience, but the standard format of most blogs frustrated me. I realized that what I want is to put up good writing and good content. Most blogs stick to a targeted audience in the hope of garnering recurring readership, and will try to do this whether or not they have anything worthwhile to say. I don't want to be an "expert," and have no interest in doing "regular updates" or "news." That makes blogging a chore.
But I can make a very comprehensive, "perennial" blog post on some topic. And rather than setting out to stick to the one topic, I can just let it get filtered by other sites. The resulting site essentially describes all my best work.
In high school ('01-05) I had a site called "rants". It was a blog read by maybe 10 people total, including my parents. I happened to email O'Reilly to ask about something and they noticed the blog in my sig. They invited me to start posting reviews in exchange for free copies. I only got through two books but it was fun! Anyway, I found my old review of Learning Perl on the wayback machine:
Actually, the fact that people take the time to write long, detailed posts about various programming topics matters a lot. At least it does to me, and I think I can pretty safely make the assumption that it matters to a few other newbie programmers too.
Unlike technical documentation, which answers the "what?" and "how?" questions, I find that blog writers (the good ones) often answer the "why?" question implicit in the information I'm trying to find, in addition to the other two. This is invaluable when I'm trying to understand what's going on, or when I don't know what questions I should be asking.
For me it's about community. Physicists, Biologists, Medical Doctors all have professional journals. But for programmers and tech entrepreneurs there are the blogs. I think we all have to realize that blogs, and places like HN, are the conscience of the tech movement and I personally feel there's a duty in saying something if it's not being said elsewhere.
Look for example at Anthropomorphic Global Warming. Whether you believe in it or not you have to admit some of the stuff that's come out recently should never have been allowed to happen. Stuff like alternative opinions (see Richard Lindzen of MIT for example) being kept out of the science journals. The reason that sort of thing happens in a community is because rational scientists don't stand up to their community and say "This is wrong. I don't agree with this guy but we should hear him out". The fact that many in the climatology community didn't do that has set back our understanding of the phenomenon by years if not decades
To me blogging is a way to stand up to my community when I feel mistakes are being made or the community is going down the wrong path. That's why I do it.
I update it when I feel there is something to say, not out of a need to keep it current for activity's sake.
I write for two reasons:
Firstly, to get my ideas from my head into written form for personal reflection upon either a concept, experience or reaction to piece of relevant content. Secondly as a means of sharing my own experience(s) with others who might be looking for a different perspective based on someone else's background.
I have also found that my technical blog has gained me several acquaintances, a few good friends, and considerable work. While my CV is rather lengthy due to my fifteen years in the industry, I have found that my blog posts offer far better insight into my thinking processes. As such, my best and brightest works situations transpired from those companies which found me via my writings.
Yes -- two of them, one of which I chiefly write and one of which I contribute to. The former is about books (which I like reading) and writing (which I like doing), and it's at http://jseliger.com . Now I'm one of the perhaps ill-advised souls in English grad school, so some of the material on it might eventually make it into papers. Occasionally I find other interesting book people too, which is an added bonus.
The other blog, Grant Writing Confidential (http://blog.seliger.com), is about my family's business, and it serves a couple of purposes: 1) it signals to clients that we actually know what we're talking about, 2) it brings in search engine traffic we'd other wise not get, and c) we get a chance to write about our work, which virtually no one else understands.
So in both cases, I write for a mixture of business and pleasure.
I have a personal blog [1] and am the editor and a regular contributor to a public policy blog [2].
I blog because: I love to write; I enjoy and learn a lot from the dialogue that blogging enables; I think regular writing exposed to the scrutiny of others makes me a better writer; I love to read what other people have written and want to contribute my share; I like knowing that something I wrote was valuable to someone else; I'm a bit narcissistic; it's a very effective method of structured procrastination [3]; and it has led to a few employment opportunities.
1) To practice writing;
2) To develop stray ideas that keep floating around in my head inconclusively;
3) To reminisce about 8 bit hardware and software.
Two, although I will never, ever call them 'blogs' because the word sounds like something smelly and disgusting that clogs up the pipes in your house and must be removed by an experienced professional.
http://journal.dedasys.com - to talk about the occasional tech related thing I've done that other people might find interesting. I don't write much, because I don't think I really do all that much that is worthy of communicating to the world at large.
Yes. I have a personal blog that is 1) for me to remember all the things that I have done and 2) to share with friends and family and anyone else who might benefit from what I have learned.
Also, this reminds me of a post from Paul Buchheit's blog awhile back: "By sharing more of our own thoughts and lives with the world, we contribute to the global pool of "how to live", and over time we also get contributions back from the world. Think of it as "open source living"."
I write a lot, but I don't blog. The people I write for don't use RSS feeds or routinely scan a large number of sites, and I'm not prolific enough on any one topic to give anyone incentive to follow my blog, since I don't have any friends that share more than one or two of my interests.
When I write about food and recipes, I send an email to three or four people I know will be interested. When I write about a backpacking or travel destination, it's an email to a different handful of people. When I write about exercise, I put it on a private blog where I record my food, exercise, and weight every day. When I write about software, I usually throw it away, though I often find an opportunity to recycle the thoughts and language in a discussion online or in person. When I write about a book, I share what I've learned by talking to a friend who would be interested. Et cetera.
I've thought about putting everything on a blog and just sending links to people when there's an entry they'd be interested in, but writing a blog that has no consistent readership and constantly bugging people to read it just feels pathetic for some reason.
Yes. I've found that pretending people are listening helps keep me focused on moving forward on projects. And sometimes people really are listening, and that helps even more.
My most successful blog, though, is my house blog (http://big-old-house.blogspot.com) - although I suppose that's my most ambitious project to date, too...
2. To put a solution to a problem in the public or make some knowledge public as often when I'm researching some problem, it is in blogs that I find solutions. This is my way of giving back
3. I'm interested in adsense optimizations and my blog provides an opportunity to test out my hunches.
When I'm picking up some new technical subject, the best way to learn about it is to google it. Most of the time, what I end up at is some blog post that tells me more or less exactly what I want to know. So it seemed only fair that I should try to give a little something back.
Some of my blog articles have been pretty popular. A couple of times they have been used as answers at StackOverflow. I always get a little buzz when I am the top google hit for some technical term.
Google rewarded me for frequent blogging by increasing my PageRank to 3. Now I don't blog as much as I used to, and they demoted me to 2. sadface
1. People have told me that they've found it useful. Even if I don't post very often, I won't take it down.
2. I get to improve my English and communication skills. Writing forces you to express yourself clearly and succinctly, while leaving out irrelevant details.
3. I often use it as a platform for publishing a lot of original content, and I'm looking for peer review. I often get useful comments.
4. It's almost effortless for me. Most of my blog posts start off as email replies to people seeking explanations to certain things.
5. It's an online identity I have full control over. When someone searches for me, my blog is what I want them to see. Not my Facebook or Twitter profile, which can tend to get clogged up with garbage from friends.
Technical blog where I mostly just write about my own projects and experiments. The blog exists so I can publicize my work and other people can find it and use it. It's also a way for people (including potential clients/employers) to find out more about me. Maybe most importantly, writing about my work motivates me to finish it, and forces me to make it understandable and useable: http://limpet.net/mbrubeck/
And a personal journal, just for keeping in touch with my extended circle of friends and family: http://mbrubeck.livejournal.com/
Mainly just for fun. I don't expect that my blog will ever be read by any significant number of people, and neither do I try to make any money out of it with ads. Writing down your ideas helps to clarify them sometimes.
I had two things to say(1,2), back in 2007 or so, so I started a blog. Now I've said them, as well as a few other things, but I don't really blog all that much these days.
Who knows, maybe I'll get inspired again one of these days...
Actually, I've been blog free until just recently. I'm a terribly sentimental type of guy, but I had never realized the potential of a blog to be almost like the "new" photo album.
Since I started with that idea, I've also realized that online identity is becoming very, very important. So much so that people land jobs because of it. It's a great way to break the ice, on the readers terms.
So while I feel like I'm late to the game, I have now immersed myself into social networks. I started blogging, flickring, facebooking, tweeting, githubbing(?), and now, buzzing.
This reason is kind of lazy, but: Blogs help in making an awesome site devoted only to a particular subject and news about that subject easily. But the only criteria is: don't let it look like a normal blog.
For a personal blog:
1) Love writing about ideas and my thoughts even though a selected few would only read them. Makes me feel good and keeps my brain working.
2) After school, we didn't have a proper language subject, just computer science, maths ..., writing maintains the communication strength. Language is important too!
Yes-ish. I posted weekly programming essays in college, and post sporadically now.
I had developed lots of opinions about programming, and I couldn't clearly articulate any of them. Writing them for a broad audience forced me to adopt a consistent view of the programming world, and helped my writing develop.
As an added bonus, the internet is overly relentless when you make a mistake. It made me strive for a higher level of precision and quality that I wouldn't have developed just through my college courses.
There was a time when I use to keep a handwritten journal of daily work "stuff" I did on programming, sysadmin & management. I think I got the idea from Clifford Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" and I found it to be very useful "logging" system of my past activities :)
Anyway as you can imagine it was hard to keep this up and eventually fell by the wayside. However I have found blogging to be a handy subset of this and the fact it can be useful to others inspires me to keep at it.
Sometimes I discover something I want to share with everyone else. Or I have an opinion I want to air to the world. In the end, it doesn't really matter that the world largely doesn't care because I don't promote my blog a lot, because I post very rarely or because my posts aren't brilliant like Steve Yegge's. I'm happy whenever there's someone who reads it, but I don't have enough time to put into making it better than it is right now.
Blogging has done one thing well to me and that's the reason I blog regularly. It helped shape my thinking well. Often when you have an idea it can be vague - formless. Writing it down gives it a good shape and setting it in stone. It's also not a magazine where every fucking thing is edited, you have the will to write whatever you want, however you want.
To summarise, discover your communicative personality and help set your ideas in stone.
It's mostly for me, to chronicle my experiences for later reference. I find that you start to see patterns over time, and these can be critical in putting yourself on the right course.
Also, it improves my writing skills.
Plus, it's kind of cathartic. Starting a company is very stressful and not very rewarding in the early stages. Writing about it helps me to blow off a little bit of steam.
Finally, what I'm writing might be interesting/useful/comedic to others.
I've found that writing about something forces you to investigate all the possible ideas and nuances around the topic in a way that you may otherwise not do. It's a great way to really understand something. It's trained me to think more logically. That's part of the reason I blog.Plus, it's what got me my current job.
Yes. Originally I had lofty ideas about writing interesting articles, but now I mainly just use it as a dumping ground for solutions to annoying technical problems to help other people who might be dealing with the same issues, or to remind myself how I solved a problem if I run into it again.
I still do have lofty ideas about writing interesting articles on mine, but amusingly the post that has attracted by far the most traffic is http://blog.iangreenleaf.com/2009/03/rsync-and-retrying-unti..., a simple little bash script for rsync. A good lesson on the power of filling a niche - clearly I wasn't the only one Googling for "rsync retry".
1) To practice my writing skill - I may be awesome at programming, but my prose comes out too slow. I hope practice will allow me to write faster, yet still coherently.
2) There are many people on the internet that are just plain wrong, and I must correct them! :)
3) To leave an impression when I am gone, albeit small.
Yes, it provides an easy way of transferring ideas and scripts I'm using at home to work without having to pass code through an overly aggressive email filter.
Besides, as others have said people can see what quality level of code I can produce from it.
YES (http://capitalgeedesign.wordpress.com).
Because, similar to a journal, it keeps me living right. It helps me live each day "worth blogging about".
-Garrett Gee
In addition to dangrossman's comments, I have friends and family that are geographically distant. Blogs, and social networking in general (Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz), help maintain a sense of emotional closeness.
I do have a blog, but I rarely update it. Occasionally I get the urge to blog again, post regularly for a few weeks, then lose interest and stop posting for up to a year. This has been going on for awhile now.
yes, but it's not the kind of thing anyone would read regularly (almost all traffic is from search). it's a simple way (i can "post" by sending myself an email) for me to keep a note of interesting links and to publish technical fixes so that they appear in google searches for others.
1) To make some written record of my opinions and thoughts for my progeny to read years after I die
2) To organize my thoughts. I find that by writing about things that somewhat confuse me, I am able to clarify what I believe and why
3) To preserve my skill at long-format(!) writing. Blog writing is different than tweeting, or emailing. "Long format" seems a stretch, but in today's technology arena a blog is like a novel used to be. Being able to cogently organize a theme, a tone, a thesis, and supporting details makes me a better communicator overall.
There are some bonus reasons: it also helps me remember easily forgotten details of issues. It is a good way to have some lightweight web design work to tweak every now and then.
Blogging is a good habit that is good for you. I hate to see that Facebook and Twitter take a lot of my time away from it.
The main reason I blog is so other people can avoid having to go through some of the struggles that I went through. Examples: posting a useful code snippet; I will soon post a guide about how I fixed my insomnia. I soon hope to get the courage to tackle deeper, more personal issues about depression, friendship, identity, purpose, family, conflict, relationships. Although insomnia is serious and personal, which is why I'm holding off on posting it... for now. It will be written and published soon. I declare it.
No, I feel a lot of people my age are not experienced enough to be able to write anything worthwhile. The result is "So I was reading this on [well-known blog] and here is my commentary", or "This is how you do X in Y", which should really be in the wiki for Y.
Not trying to be combative, but so what if they are?
My last (and widely viral) blog post was about me reacting to a blog post, but that didn't change the fact that many people found it interesting enough to forward on to their friends, post to Reddit, etc. I've learned so much from the reactions to my 3 short blog posts that I don't think I'll ever be "too busy" or "too inexperienced" to blog again in my life.
You must be the exception and congratulations on that. But surely we could all do without another junior-level-liberal-know-it-all-cause-I-keep-up-with-reddit/hn who will chime in on Google Buzz, Apple IPad, that dude who neglected his Markdown project, why Flash is dead, why Flash is not dead, why I switched to Django, why some language is the new hotness* , and beginner JQuery tips for good measure.
1) Blogging is like going to the gym except for writing: if I stopped, I'd end up an overworked, pudgy Japanese salaryman with no writing ability in English.
2) Blogging makes people say nice things about my ideas and that has always given me the warm fuzzies.
3) My decision to start a business 3.5 years ago was heavily influenced by accounts of success I had read from other people, and I wanted to leave similar encouragement.
4) My blog (or rather, a half-dozen handpicked articles from it) makes a far better case for hiring me than my resume or publicly available source code does.