The harsh reality of technical blogs

It must be tough.

At the beginning of every blog’s life, there is so much passion and love - only for most of them to be abandoned soon after.

I remember how excited I was about my old blog, having spent quite some time to set it up with Gatsby and Gatsby Cloud.

And yet it didn’t take long for the honeymoon phase to fade away. Customzing the gatsby-theme I used, as well as working with GraphQL turned out to be quite cumbersome and unnecessarily complex for something as simple as a blog.

So why did I choose a new framework (as well as a technology I was quite unfamiliar with) back then?

Underlying motivation

I could have just as well chosen something like wordpress or squarespace ¹ to build my blog, but that would have been cheating right?

Let’s pretend that wordpress² worked perfectly out of the box ³, why wouldn’t I choose something like that for my blog?

Demonstration of skill

Many developers suffered - or are still suffering from Imposter syndrome and are therefore worried that someone might find out they are ‘not real developers’ or ‘just faking it’.

By choosing hyped⁴ technologies or frameworks for their blogs, they have proof that they are not total n00bz⁵ after all.

ℹ️ Totally unrelated authors note:

This blog is built with Astro, which is at the time of this post still in beta! Check it out, it’s pretty hyped and cool!

New is always better

Most blogging developers I know are not typical 9-5 workers. They read several other blogs and generally keep up to date with current technologies and frameworks.

Personally I’d be surprised if someone who is excited and fascinated by new inputs and technologies, chose the same tech stack they are already familiar⁶ with, for their blog.

Blogs - unlike open source or personal projects, offer a safe space to try something out and if it doesn’t work out, no harm done.

Personal statement

Additionally blogs are not only a platform for personal expressing oneself, they are a personal expression.

Take a moment and reflect on this.

Just have a look at my current blog, look at its name, the colors I used and … anything really.

The design of this blog is definitely going to change a bit though :)

Death 💀

To summarize I think that the primary reason for the short life expectancy of blogs is the original motivation behind creating it in the first place:

Demonstration of skill, once the blog is uploaded, skill has been proven, street cred amassed …

-> there is no reason to continue posting

New is always better, after having tamed the new and wild technology/framework, novelty wears off and …

-> there is no reason to continue posting.

Personal statement, the design of the blog itself is more important than its content, once it is capturing the intended self-expression …

-> there is no reason to continue posting.

Final words

That being said, I do not want to discourage developers (or anyone really) from creating blogs!

That would be quite hypocritical as I basically fall into all of these categories myself too :D

If you also have a sad blog lying around somewhere, feel free to contact me!

I’d ❤ to create some sort of graveyard or orphanage page linking to discontinued blogs right here on this blog :)