Ask HN: Why do you write engineering blogs?

[cyndunlop]

For those of you that write for corporate engineering blogs, what's the motivation/incentive? Do you feel it's more rewarding to write for your own blog or a corporate engineering blog?

[xkcd-sucks]

I'm aging faster than I understood; have made basically no big impact on the world; am too burned out to be motivated towards such ends; do not believe in "afterlife"; likely won't have any children; and my cats are sterilized and won't outlive me anyway. Engineering blogging feels like my best chance at a little slice of Immortality, at least enough to feel "productively" occupied.

Oh, did not notice the corporate engineering thing at first. We don't have one after being acquired, but when we did the motivation was basically for recruiting purposes. Also surprisingly for internal documentation, people go to Google which indexes public websites but they don't search internal Confluence and Github Wiki articles

[softwaredoug]

I mostly prefer my own blog. Less editing and bureaucracy. That said if you’re new to blogging, your company’s editorial support can be a nice help.

If you want to know why I think blogging - or “writing early/often/informally in public” is important, here’s some reasons.

- I don’t believe I know something unless I can disseminate that information.

- I need feedback on what I supposedly “know”. The mild embarrassment of friends engaging with my writing and giving me feedback is a fantastic way to learn.

- It’s practice for communicating hard ideas to people that don’t share my background.

- It is a natural extension of my interest in the topic.

- It’s a natural milestone on a side project - explaining what I built and why

- It highlights my expertise and markets me to employers.

- It is practice for communicating hard concepts to others or persuading them

- therapy to rant about the state of some topic

- as a way of writing down information that i can share with colleagues now and in the future

- to seed google with things past me learned and wants future me to find when they’re stuck

- to share something cool I learned or figured out

- to amplify someone or an event, article, etc I really want to support

- to fully own my writing away from any specific social media site

- just because I like attention :)

And many many more

[robcohen]

In my experience, it’s used as a recruiting tool. High quality talent is usually attracted to orgs with a transparent culture, and well-written blog posts show that the culture is healthy to external talent.

[bignavy]

Not sure I qualify as 'high quality talent'....but I have rarely read an engineering blog where I didn't think, "It would be fun to work there."

To be fair, if the culture is disfunctional I'm not sure that anybody is blogging about it, and I doubt they pick dumb mistakes and bugs to blog about. "After three days of troubleshooting DNS, and a two hour blamestorming session, we checked the logs and there was a leading space. Don't be like us, kids."

[dtaht]

Actually, while I like a well written corporate engineering blog, it is knowing that the individual voices within an org are allowed to blog, and for that matter, post emails to mailing lists, without oversight, that I find attractive.

If a company does not allow its engineers to participate on mailing lists and in the open source processes... sigh. There are an awful lot of stilled voices out there.

[jimmychoozyx]

https://docusaurus.io/ with its mermaidJS (diagrams as code) plugin.

i am working on turning my portfolio into a docusaurus site

i like it because it offers:

markdown docs w/ markdown diagrams, markdown blog, pages (as JSX)

- I'll use the docs aspect for two sections:

1. a set of portfolio projects

2. a set of boilerplate projects as a demo of my favorite devops & dev stack along with a brief description & tutorial for setting up the boilerplate.

- the pages aspect as the main page of my portfolio website, and maybe 1-2 other pages (perhaps one on career progression and one on the value proposition of my services)

- and then I'll have a markdown blog easily available as well, which I plan to use once a month or so to discuss what I've learned that month.

seems like a good & organized setup to me.

[wageslave99]

I did it for a while, for "exposure".

Now I keep my own personal technical blog that I consider a technical diary of the things I learn each month.

[makeitrain]

In the last few days I’ve seen a lot of good blog posts that helped me with code. Companies like log rocket and digital ocean. It’s great content marketing and recruiting, even if the posts are just generally helpful and not specific to their service.

For devs who write, I do it as notes to myself or others when I think I figured out something useful, especially if it was originally unclear or I didn’t find any helpful examples. I appreciate everything I’ve read by others and I feel like contributing.

Since I believe in the value of writing, I can understand devs doing corporate blogging. They’re a team player and want to promote the place they work at. Maybe they make a real impact on marketing and recruiting and like playing on a winning team. Getting paid to talk about and evangelize tech is pretty cool.

Edit: fix typo.

[pawelduda]

Some companies increase their SEO presence with it, I'm against it because this spam ends up in search engine results but consider:

- how to make <business type> app in <tech we sell>: generic story and hire us

- is <tech we sell> still relevant in <year>: big surprise, it's more relevant than ever and we got you covered

- new features in <tech we use>: literally cherry-picked changelog enriched with SEO without adding anything new, our experts already make use of it

Worst thing is there are some good pieces of insight but they get buried by the rest

[dtaht]

I do not write corporate engineering blogs. I write truthful, and sometimes funny, engineering blogs. The blog used to be a source of genuine truth and engagement, now, they are too often sterilized, and boring. I know my writing would be "prettier" after being through a corporate editing pass. Here´s me channeling the BOFH: https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/trouble_in_paradise/

[Sevii]

I get paid more to write for corporate blogs but it’s more fun to write my own blog.

[nektro]

corporate engineering blogs are marketing

personal engineering blogs tend to be something the author wanted to document so they could look back on later or thought that others would find the problem/solution cool