Writing Tech Blogs are Hard Work

I once read an article that said more people need to write technical blogs. That the problem with much of the technology field was that people did not write in-depth articles on the stuff that they are doing. And, if more people were able to take the time and post a blog entry here and there we would all be better for it. As nice as that sounds, I have to say that writing technical posts are difficult, time consuming, and can quickly go out of date.

First off, writing in general is not easy, and that is before you get to adding the technical part on top of it. There are a number of brilliant developers, system engineers, and devops people that can create some of the most complex and unique solutions to problems, and yet cannot begin to write the first bit of documentation or narratives to describe what it is that they have done. It is not that they are dumb, they just have not honed the writing skill, or just might not be proficient at it. Writing is like coding, if you don’t use it, you can lose it. Also, it is a skill that can be developed and honed overtime. Myself, my writing skills are rusty after taking a long time off from it, and I am trying to get back into the flow.

There are some people that recommend to become talented at writing, you need to be able to dedicate an hour a day to it, or 5 hours a week. And that is just the writing part. That does not tie in working on the technical elements that are needed to provide content for the audience you are trying to reach. Maybe a few years back when I did not have family obligations this would have been possible, but now I have to sneak in time here and there. And, for the casual tech blogger, this is not going to be the case. Unless you are doing a lot of writing for work, there is little time to develop your writing skills. This leads many people to turn away from writing a technical article even though they might have some of the best ideas, if only they could get them into a usable format.

Now, the next big item on why it is so hard to write technical articles is that gathering together the technical information is not easy. Don’t get me wrong, that is not to say that there are not a number of topic that you can write on. That is far from the truth. There are probably thousands of areas and topics that can be written about. But, just like writing, it takes time to gather that information. Now, there are a few high profile bloggers that are able to dedicate their jobs to writing technical blogs. Many of them are evangelist or full time employees whose job it is to talk about certain technical areas. That is great for them, and to honest, I am a bit envious. For the average person devops engineer or develop it is not so easy.

There are some companies that will allow you to blog on the work you are doing, but for most people that is not the case. So, on top of your full time job, you then most go and use your own resources and your own time to work on getting together the data, the code, and whatever else, to get together the technical information just to begin writing the article. Once the work has been done to vet the project or the topic that you are looking at writing about, you have to circle back around and figure out how it is that you want to get the information together to put it in a story for others to read. This goes back to item number one, and I have already mentioned how difficult even that first step is. Now we are taking it to a higher level by saying you do not just have to write a story, but that you must structure it around the technical information.

So, after getting the data together and know what you are going to write about, you have to structure it. There are screen shots that have to be made, code snippets that must be shared, links to technical information that must be included. As easy as all of that sounds, it is much harder than it sounds. Figuring out how to clip an image or not make it be 4 megs in size, or how to get the images aligned so that it all looks correct. Then there is the question of where do you put your code you are going to share. How do you get the numbers showing on code? How do you enable syntax highlighting on the code samples? All of that is not easy. All of that can be overwhelming when you just want to write an article to share some information with other techies.

And the last fact of the matter is that you never know if all your efforts are for naught. You could write a great article, but if people don’t find out about it, then what do you do? Do you keep plugging away and hope people will stumble upon the articles you have written? Nobody wants to do a bunch of work for nothing. So, in recap, writing technical articles is difficult. It can be hard, and it is not always rewarding. I thank all the people that stick with it, but I understand all of those who don’t.