Reflecting back to the time I was deciding whether to start my own blog site has made me remember that it wasn’t an easy decisions. Now I’ve been writting blogs for several years, and I rarely care about whether I’m an expert or a novice in the subject that I’m writing about. But this wasn’t always the case. I used to be really worried that I would write about something and people would call me out for not being right, and this thought was scary. Starting to write publicly was not an easy step to take, and there’s probably a lot of people out there who probably feel the same as I did, so I wanted to write this to hopefully encourage everyone out there to start writing.
The first thing to get over is, just because you write a blog about a topic, it does not mean that need to be an expert in the subject. In fact, a lot of my blogs are about topics I had no expertise on. My blog is filled with Postgres blogs, and when I first started writing about it I had barely used it and had no idea what an index even was. In fact, that’s one of the biggest benefits of writing about things you don’t know much about, by writing about it and trying to find the words to explain differet subjects it helps you organise your thoughts, do reasearch and getting to really understand the subject you are talking about. If you read about a topic and you think you already know what you are talking about, try writing it down, you’ll start finding all of the holes in your knowledge, and you’ll learn a lot by filling those holes. To me, that’s the biggest benefit of writing.
It is very likely that the things you write about will have mistakes, especially when you are writing about a subject you are not an expert on. No one is going to think you are stupid if there’s something “wrong” in your post. In fact, if you get to the point where people are commenting things about the stuff you write that’s a great thing. It means other people are reading your blog, and they are giving you free feedback for you to take on. It can be hard to get critisised on stuff you wrote, but when you get past that, it is a great learning opportunity, even a chance for you to further research a topic you thought you knew well enough! On top of that, you’ll find that by writing about the subject you’ll likely end up being a subject matter expert, and most people are reading your blog because they don’t know about the subject as much as you, and they’ll find your writing useful. Don’t think people around know more than you do. Remember, people may know a lot of stuff, but they will forget it as soon as they stop using it. A PhD on a Computer Science field may find your blogs on “Intro to Python” very useful indeed.
You don’t need to write about anything new. At the beggining I would get stuck thinking about what to write about. I was so scared to write about any technology because I was so afraid that I knew nothing about it. So my first blog post was about my journey into tech, because no one could tell me that a story about my life could be wrong (lol). Eventually I started learning about databases and distributed systems, because I landed a job where all of this was relevant and I had very little experience about it. So I started reading textbooks, and then picking some of the topics I’d find interesting and writing about it, using the textbook as a reference. This was an easy way to find topics to write about.
Over time, you get more relaxed about the stuff you write about, and it is easier to find topics. A lot of times, the things I write about are about topics that come up in conversations with colleagues, from things that I think could be helpful for everyone if it’s written down, or simply topics with helpful advice, such as this blog.
Finally, you don’t need to be a “good writer” to be able to write blogs. ALl my life I grew up thinking I wasn’t good at writing. And perhaps I won’t be the next Ernst Hemingway, but practice makes better. If you are not great at writing, you’ll get better as you do it 1. You’ll start finding your own rythm.
Bottom line is, there are a lot of benefits to writing, from increasing your own knowledge, to knowledge sharing with others. It can also open up opportunities when people start reading your blog, as you become a subject matter expert. Don’t let the fear of being wrong to stop you. The benefit it brings to you is much greater than the irrational reasons stopping you from doing so.
It can be tempting to use AI to help you “sound better”, in fact I’m still tempted every once in a while. There are a couple of reasons to avoid this: if you use AI you won’t get much better at writing. Part of writing is to start with a draft and then re-organising your thoughts to make text flow better, and make topics clearer. This is a good skill to develop and you should avoid letting the AI do this. Secondly, if you write a good blog post and start letting the AI meddle in, I can assure you that you’ll be dissapointed with the end result and you won’t be as proud of your writing as if it was your own words. Remember, if you come back to this in a few yeors time, do you want to recognise the voice of younger you, or do you rather read a generic AI voice? ↩︎