Today is the 5-year anniversary of my first blog post in 2019. Since that time I've written nearly 100 articles for my blog, something that I am quite proud of! Writing has had a huge positive impact on my life and career.

I invite you, dear reader, to start writing about topics you're interested in and sharing those writings on the internet. This article is me putting my finger on the scale by sharing what I would do differently if I were to start over again.

Create what you want!

The world is a weird place, and you can't control what becomes popular. Create what you want to create for the sake of creating and enjoy the ride!

My most popular article by an extremely wide margin is one I didn't expect: "Move or recover your Wordle stats". I created this little utility for me and my friends and didn't expect hundreds of thousands of people to use it until the New York Times shared the URL on Twitter.

My most recent viral article I wrote in ~15 minutes about an unexpected behavior in Python regular expressions that caused a bug in some of my code.

Own your work§

Publishing on the internet means deciding where you will publish your work. We've seen far too many platforms either die or become completely user-hostile. To prevent this from happening to your hard work:

• Create the original work in a format that is transformable (such as Markdown or HTML).
• Publish that work to publicly accessible URLs that you can share.
• Share your URLs in many ways, like RSS, email newsletter, social media, or elsewhere.

For easy-to-start publishing platforms, I recommend either GitHub Pages or Bear Blog. If you have the savvy and interest: host content on your own website. There are far too many guides to getting started with this, choose one using a technology that you're interested in.

See also: "Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere".

Let your authenticity shine§

Please note that I am a cis white male and has not had to justify my existence or expertise in a space. Unfortunately not all of my friends can be their authentic selves online, but knowing them in real life I certainly wish that the world allowed them to be.

I always enjoy when a blog shows off the author, either through writing style, phrases, personal touches, pictures, jokes, or little pieces of life. Don't be afraid to leave in things you think about when you're writing. I try to strike the right balance between how I might speak about an idea if I were to talk in person and writing for a diverse audience.

Don't put yourself in a box§

You don't have to write about the same one or two topics, forever. I am guilty of this, and I am working on writing about more than only open source and security. Recently I have started to write about video-game preservation.

Again, write about what you want to write about. Writing about something new, even if it's only once, can be very refreshing. Don't let vague feelings about what your audience "expects" to get in the way of creative expression.

Don't think you only need to write about "professional" topics or topics that have broad appeal. You can write about anything at all from rocket science to what's happening in your local community.

Start at the end§

Start with the conclusion! A reader should be able to know your main ideas without a single page scroll (because almost all readers won't make it past the first few paragraphs). Check out how your draft looks on a phone to confirm this is the case.

After that first page scroll you've already pared down to the more dedicated readers so start giving them details. If you like narrative writing like me, this is a good place to start the actual story.

Keep it short§

In terms of writing, you should be able to write the main points and details of an article quickly, assuming you've done your research beforehand.

Once all the main points are there, resist the urge to make an in-progress article "more grand" or "comprehensive". Instead, link out to resources that already exist or plan on writing follow-up articles later. Many smaller articles are more easily consumable for readers and more writeable for you (double win!)

Ship early instead of never§

I've wasted so much time trying to "finish" blog posts. Endlessly trying to polish something into being perfect is not worth it, because it increases the chances that the work won't ever be published!

Try to be okay publishing something that isn't perfect, because your idea of "perfect" will change over time. You need to go through the "research-write-edit-publish" cycle to improve, not by endlessly editing one piece.

Hang up when you're done§

Don't worry about "conclusions" or "wrapping-up" a blog post at the end. Just stop writing as soon there's no more to say. I promise almost no one reads all the way to the end (except your most loyal readers: remember they like you!)

Speaking of stopping: this is it! Thanks to everyone who has read this blog 💜

Wow, you made it to the end!

• Share your thoughts with me on Mastodon, email, or Bluesky.
• Browse this blog’s archive of 195 entries.
• Check out this list of cool stuff I found on the internet.
• Follow this blog on RSS or the email newsletter.
• Go outside (best option)