I second your comment about referring back to sysadmin posts. I do this all the time! Sometimes I even find my own old blogposts in Google.
And I still get a steady trickle of grateful comments/emails in response to a tossed-off post about getting Linux scanner drivers working, many of which are genuinely moving to read.
I started blogging long before AI became mainstream, but I'd say: totally worth it.
Re blockers:
- Novelty: I routinely search for very niche, "boring" information, and am disappointed by how few in-depth blogposts I find.
- “AI can explain most topics better than I can”. I doubt it! I rarely find current AI as valuable as a good blog post. It tends to be shallow and regress to the mean, and b/c of hallucinations it's untrustworthy, so a lot of time is wasted fact-checking.
- Fear of shipping: if it isn't relevant, nobody will read it (unless you're already famous)
Re questions:
- What made it worth it for you?
Clarifying my thoughts, connecting with strangers who think about the same things, the leverage "having a platform" produces (it opens a lot of doors), and gaining prestige in certain niches.
- What kinds of posts actually worked (for learning, career, network, opportunities)?
I don't think this is simple to answer until the heat death of the universe. Traffic stats is a very poor estimator of value delivered. Which posts I am most proud of, and how much traffic they got, are weakly correlated.
- Any practical format that lowers the bar (length, cadence, themes)?
Things that you are obsessed with. It's a tonne of work writing a good post, and sometimes you publish it and nobody cares, so it has to be intrinsically rewarding.
- If you were starting today, what would you do differently?
I don't know! Probably put less effort into trying to appear intelligent/impressive, which rarely works anyway.
These are my off-the-top thoughts based on over a decade of blogging.
I have been tinkering on a little price drop alert scraper written in Python. It's run as a cron job, and every day it checks the prices of a list of urls (my clothing staples from various outdoor retailers, mostly) and sends me an email with any products that have gone on sale.
I've been running it for over a year, but now I have fixed it up and made a little landing page to see if there's interest for a stupid-simple price watch service like this (no need to install an extension or create an account):
I tried to use pandoc+revealJS, then tried presenterm (which was really nice but didn't give me enough control over font sizes), and then settled on Marp, which worked great.
This is a fascinating take. I have been thinking about your comment for two days.
I think you're right in some cases (when working in a field one has mastered, for example), and I think I could probably go in the direction of getting it right the first time.
But the way I see it, any time I'm doing something new or innovative, I'm doing something I don't know how to do, which takes trial and error; and troubleshooting is basically figuring things out by trial and error, in a systematic way.
Though a lot of time it is used for fixing bugs, I think troubleshooting as a skill and mindset is equally useful for creating new things, where you are solving for something.
Notice that if you mouse over "9 hours ago" on the story it shows the timestamp 2025-02-25. 9 hours ago was not 2025-02-25. If you mouse over the "7 hours ago" on credit_guy's comment, the timestamp shows 2025-02-26. One day after it was submitted, two days before it made the frontpage.
Thanks for posting an archive link. My site has survived previous HN traffic spikes on Fly.io's free tier, but 256mb of RAM wasn't quite adequate this time :)
And I still get a steady trickle of grateful comments/emails in response to a tossed-off post about getting Linux scanner drivers working, many of which are genuinely moving to read.
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