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How To Write More Blog Posts
September 10, 2024<br>min read • by<br>Loris Cro
AKA the three laws of mental thermodynamics.
You are a software engineer and have the luxury of facing interesting problems. You would like to tell others about the interesting stuff that you work on , but once your pen is pointed at blank paper (or your cursor is at offset 0 of an empty file), you just don’t know how to make progress .<br>In this post I have some advice for you, but beware: advice for complex problems (writing is complex) usually has to be either actionable but narrowly applicable, or widely applicable but very high-level.<br>I’m going for the second kind, which means that you have good chances that your issues are addressed at some level by this post, but it’s going to be up to you to figure out the details of your specific situation.<br>The first law of mental thermodynamics<br>You won’t be able to consistently get writing done unless you truly believe it’s a valuable investment for your energy.<br>Some would say “subconsciously” instead of “truly”, but the point is that writing is not something that you can convince yourself is important any more than you can convince yourself that something is not boring (Veritasium, Vsauce).<br>This is not unique to writing: we all have an internal compass that gives a score to all the activities we could pour our energies into, and you can’t just consciously make the compass point in an arbitrary direction.<br>Given this, then the first question that we need to face is: why is the act of writing not registering as a truly valuable activity for your internal compass?<br>There can be plenty of answers to this question, but chances are that you tried in the past and found that it required too much effort for the amount of value it produced in return.<br>Since this is a “how to” post, I will immediately jump to the life hack part, and leave to you the task of doing introspective analysis, including figuring out what exactly is value in this context.<br>So here’s the life hack: one great way to have something register as valuable for our internal compass is to have others tell us that it is valuable. This is not a universal solution, but it will work extremely well for almost everybody.<br>In other words, write with the explicit goal of popularity .<br>Please note that I’m not saying that this is (or should be) the ultimate goal of writing. What I’m saying is that if you want to write more but have difficulty doing so, then writing with the explicit goal of crafting a popular blog post might help.<br>Having your blog post be commented by your friends, or even featured on Hacker News, Lobsters, and other link aggregators will feel flattering and will definitely send a jolt to your internal compass, recalibrating its internal mechanisms.<br>Additionally, while writing for popularity might seem a shallow goal, it is perfectly rational to want others to listen to what we have to say.<br>Of course one could overfit this particular goal and miss the more important goals hidden behind it, but writing a blog post that is never going to be read by anybody is dangerously close to a tree falling in a forest without anybody to hear it.<br>The second law of mental thermodynamics<br>Ok so we want to write for popularity, how do we write something popular then?<br>In my experience, the only thing that makes a technical blog post popular is if it teaches something to the reader; nothing else. But beware that there’s a big caveat!<br>Creating an informative blog post doesn’t mean that it will teach anything to the reader . It takes energy for people to read something and there’s an ocean of things that they could be reading, which means that they too have their own internal compass to contend with.<br>So how do you teach developers anything if being informative is not enough?<br>Teaching means that your “students” are presently at point X in their path towards a better understanding of software engineering, and that you provide them convenient access to information that can get them to X+1.<br>Information for moving from X-1 to X is not going to be valuable to them, as that’s stuff they already know.<br>Information for moving from X^2 to (X^2) + 1 will also not be very valuable because it’s too far from where they’re standing right now, so your information will be less valuable than anything between (X, X^2].<br>That said, in reality we don’t have a teacher-student relationship, as we’re all peers trying to become better at our craft, which means that everybody is at different stages of progress, and also aiming to reach different points at the horizon.<br>The third law of mental thermodynamics<br>A compelling blog post is one that either deliberately or by accident ends up identifying a wide slice of people who would immediately benefit from consuming the content.<br>Statistically speaking, a compelling blog post then is one that is in tune with the times, and...