How Not to Start a Blog

Dec 22, 20244 min read

Table of Contents

The Best Time to Start is Now

I’ve been thinking of setting up a blog for many years. I’d heard it’s a good way to improve my writing, get some visibility amongst my peers, and give back to the open community that has benefited me so immensely. It’s safe to say that my career as a software engineer and later on, an engineering manager wouldn’t have been possible without the amazingly free and accessible world we’ve made. I wanted to be a part of that.

The idea excited me; I wanted to have my own small corner of the internet. One that I could share with a small, but tightly bound group of like-minded people who were eager to learn, engage in discussions, and share what they knew.

However, I was held back by fear of not being good enough. You shouldn’t waste other people’s time if you don’t have anything novel to share, I thought.

Writing is an act of vulnerability. It exposes all the ugly in your thoughts. You can’t write a good piece on a subject if your understanding of that subject is flawed. To me, writing felt like getting naked in front of a crowd, but for your brain. If that makes sense.

That scared me. Fear of rejection kept me from writing. I thought I’d be ready one day, but as you may guess, that day never came.

The Making of This Blog

This Blog's Perfect Lighthouse Scores This isn’t important.

While setting up my blog, I did all the optimizations expected of a nerd:

This is all fine. At this point, the blog was set up and ready for me to actually start writing. But I didn’t stop there:

Mind you, I was doing all of these for a completely empty blog. At first, you might think I have focus issues, but this was the fear doing its thing. I was distracting myself with what felt easy and natural from what was really important: Actually writing content.

My First Post

Alright, at this point, I had finally convinced myself to stop running and start writing. What did I do? I opened ChatGPT and instructed it to write my first post for me. It wasn’t great at first, but it got better with more context. I even published it. It’s right there in my git history. Do you remember that I said one of my goals was to improve my writing? And what did I do? I generated my first post using AI. You get the idea. I was running away again.

After one more day of wrestling with myself, I sat down at my desk and got to writing. And I’m happy to report that I’m feeling liberated.

What I Learned (and Why It Doesn’t Matter)

I learned a lot of things in my little detours:

But here’s the thing: that wasn’t the goal. A waste is still a waste, even if it’s an educational one. My goal was to start writing, not to become a web optimization guru.

Takeaways

Don’t let your fears hold you back as long as I allowed mine to. Don’t let your inner voice convince you that you’re not good enough to publish, or be heard. You are. Each person’s experiences are unique. No one’s ever been in the exact situation that you’ve been. No one’s walked the exact path that you have.

Let this post serve as a reminder that you don’t have to be perfect to start.

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