Tips on starting developer blog

Starting a developer blog is no small feat. You need domain, hosting and technology platform to publish your blog on. And that is just the infrastructure. Another vital part is content.

In this post I would like to offer a few tips to those thinking about/wanting to start their own blog.

1) Start with content

Don't start thinking about all the complicated web-stuff you need in order to be able to share your blog posts with the world. Instead start with content. Make a list of topics you would like to cover and try writing a few posts. I would recommend starting on established platform like dev.to, GitHub Pages or something along these lines. Find something that takes minimum time to get started.

Once you have a few posts published and know that this is something you plan to invest your time in, start looking for your own place.

2) Don't over-engineer the tech part

Sure blog that supports categories, tags, has great syntax highlighting, very good search and works on all screens sounds nice but is also pretty complicated. You may also have noticed that you already visited some not so great blogs from technical standpoint that nevertheless were invaluable and you read the whole post. It is the content that matters and as long as the experience is not totally bad, no one will care if your website isn't perfect.

3) Go with the proven tech

Sure it is exciting to use the newest, hottest thing in web dev space for your new blog but readers won't care and it will cause you a headache. I think it is totally fine to use something like SquareSpace or WIX (not referral links) to create a blog on your domain. Proven static site generators like Jekyll can also be a great approach.

4) Write for fun and for yourself

Sure having 100s people daily reading your blog must be nice but unless you already have big Twitter following or some other way to get your post in front a lot of people, you won't have a big traffic. I would suggest not even including Google Analytics so you don't have the temptation to check the numbers daily and feel bad because they are low. I don't have analytics on my blog and I am quite happy.

I started writing mainly because I enjoy it and I can refer to my posts later when I need a refresher on something.

5) Not every developer needs a blog

Don't like the idea idea of blogging? Then don't do it. It is totally fine and does not make you a worse developer.