I’ve fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole today reading posts about how you can get ahead in your technical career by writing online. A lot of suggestions in these posts, some which made a lot of sense: check you spelling and grammar, write to a routine/deadline, don’t be afraid to rewrite, etc. All fine and good.
But there were also suggestions that just made me groan. Some of them involved dealing with Twitter a lot more: cross-posting your content there, tweeting things that are “too small” to be a blog post, etc. And one writer suggested getting feedback on drafts before you publish them. This one amused me because the writer compared this to pair programming, something I’m not a huge fan of. That’s probably why I found this suggestion off-putting.
All of these are understandable in principal, especially if your goal is to get readers and build an audience. And that’s not really what I want from a blog, at least not from the ones I have right now. I keep them for fun and because I want a place to document and share my experience and ideas. If they were to help my career, that’s great, but I don’t really expect them to.
But hearing about what’s involved in writing for developing my career gives me pause in starting a blog like this. I’m not sure I like the idea of posting to Twitter (or Mastodon, or any other platform other than the blog itself) or getting my content reviewed before I publish it. Surely one’s not required to do this to be successful technical writer, right?