04/06/2020

3min read

#thoughts

Is it worthy to have a blog in 2020?

If you search for something on Google, it surely will give you a lot of content. But, is all of this content relevant? Probably the results on the first page are; and I bet you’ll find what you’re searching is within the first 3 or 4 results (in the real world, you won’t search after the second).

If you search for “Javascript error on StackOverflow”, the same will happen - a lot of stuff will be in the results. But, how many results will be relevant for you? How many results you will need to solve your bug?

Trying to answer those questions, I (think I have) answered the question on the title of this post - “is it worthy to have a blog in 2020?” - The answer is yes.

But, why at all?

I’ve started to write about technology and carrer in the beggining of 2018, when I saw my friend Vinicius Brasil writing on Medium. That time I thought “well I could do that too!”. He encouraged me a lot to write on Medium too, and it was a huge opportunity to improve my english skills - at the time, I was a bit rusty.

While writing, I noticed that we could find content for almost everything, but only in english - there was and there is still a lack of good content about technology in portuguese. Due to it, I started to write for Training Center, a brazilian software development Medium publication, focused on teaching newcomers.

Somewhere in 2018 I also discovered The Practical Dev - or dev dot to, as many people call it. dev.to is a huge software development community, and their applications are open source - it says a lot about them. At that time, I was writing on my personal Medium, for Training Center and also Codeburst (a great Medium publication focused on web development).

The engagement on dev.to was higher than on Medium. So I decided to keep my brazilian portuguese posts on my personal Medium profile and the english texts on dev.to. But, we all know Medium - it hasn’t syntax highlight, the paywall sucks, the editor is a bit limited… There are a lot of issues related to it, and if you search on Google “why Medium sucks”, you’ll find a lot more reasons.

In front of this, I decided to redo my website (which was a static generated from a React app) and turn it into a blog. And today it’s super easy and fast to create a personal blog. You have Jekyll, Hugo, Gridsome (for Vue) and Gatsby (for React) as platforms; also, you have Netlify CMS, Forestry, Strapi, CloudCannon and a lot more headless CMS. If you’re old school, you can always count on WordPress as well.

I like to say that having a personal blog and writing on communities is almost the same thing as having a full-time job and do some freelances. For me, having a personal blog is a nice experience because you’ll have a life-time project, where you can experiment and try new things (which you probably can’t do on your full-time job), you can write about (almost) anything since it’s your blog and also you create a new source of knowledge.

As I was saying in the begining of this post, you can find a great amount of content on the internet, but the amount of good content won’t be the same. That’s the main reason I believe having a blog is worthy!

Take a look on this list of awesome software engineering blogs

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jlozovei | 2023