Why Developers Start Blogs and Then Stop

"Starting My Blog!"

The first post on a developer blog is almost always the same.

"Starting my blog!" or "How I set up my tech blog." Whether it's on Medium, dev.to, or GitHub Pages, two days go into choosing the platform and setting up the theme. Publishing that first post feels great. The second and third ride the momentum.

Then, around post four, it quietly stops.

Code Every Day, But Can't Write

Check the profiles of trending posts on developer platforms and you'll often find the last post was months ago. GitHub contribution graphs are packed, but the blog is empty. We write code every day -- so why can't we write prose? Both involve typing text, after all.

The reason is simple. Code gives you immediate results, but a blog post gets ignored with no visible consequence. Hit deploy and the service runs. Publish a post? 3 views. One of them is you.

The Graveyard of Drafts

Developers are professionally predisposed to perfectionism. These are people who can't tolerate a single compile error or lint warning.

That perfectionism carries over to writing. "Someone else has already covered this better." "What if I get something technically wrong?" "I should go deeper before publishing." Drafts pile up. The publish button drifts further away.

We tell ourselves "just ship it and improve later" with code, but with writing, it's "I'll publish once it's perfect." The irony. (Realizing this and still not being able to fix it is the real trap.)

Write for Yourself Six Months Ago

The problem is the target audience.

Start with "I want to help other developers" and you naturally set up a competitive frame. Do I need to be better than the official docs? More thorough than a popular blogger?

If you think of writing for yourself six months ago, it gets easier. Six months ago, I didn't understand this concept. I struggled. A post that would have helped past me -- that's enough.

3 views is fine. One of them might be your future self.

The Weight of "One Post a Week"

A writing habit is like an exercise habit.

"One post per week" is as hard to keep as "gym every day." The first month runs on passion. The second month runs on willpower. Skip once in the third month, and the fourth month vanishes entirely.

If there's a secret, it's lowering the bar. Not one post a week, but one a month. Not a 1,000-word essay, but a 300-word memo. Maintaining the act of writing matters more than the content.

But even as I say this, I'm not keeping up myself. Five drafts sitting in my save folder right now.

The Publish Button

The person writing this -- me -- was also dormant for a while.

Nothing felt good enough. But today I realized: to write something you're happy with, you first have to write something you're not. There are no perfect posts. There are only published ones.

Today, I press publish. 3 views is fine.

At least I wrote it.