To have, or not to have, a professional blog?

I recently attended my first Write the Docs conference in Portland and absolutely loved it. There was something so gratifying about spending two days in this hipster city with hundreds of nerdy writers, indulgently talking about putting words on websites. Additionally, since I had been active in the community Slack for the past 5 years, this was also a big meet-all-my-internet-friends-irl moment. All of this happening inside a concert-venue-turned-high-school building made me feel like a kid in the best way.

Among the many sessions I attended was a session about writing your own blog hosted by the legendary Tom Johnson. I had just rebooted my portfolio site, written 2 articles, but had run into a wall while trying to be consistent and produce a third. So this unconference was right up my alley.

A bit of background here: since 2024 I have been writing short film reviews for every movie I watch. Not Substack article length, but not one liners either. They are just long enough to fit on an Instagram story. 2 years and 150+ reviews later, I have found this habit to be enormously rewarding. I won’t pretend to be a trend-setting cultural critic, but I discovered feelings and perspectives within myself that I previously hadn’t realized I possessed, and established the capacity to convey them more eloquently than I thought myself capable.

These are the things I would continue to write even if no one read them, which was my assumption when I started. However, since I post these on my personal Instagram, many friends have told me they enjoy reading them, and allow my reviews to influence them into watching/not watching a film, which only added to my enjoyment.

This made me fall in love with writing in a way that I never had before, and I wanted to do more of it in different areas, and the most obvious next subject was a professional blog. I wrote a short article “Why are there still technical writers?” where I addressed our profession’s relationship with AI, as well as my own, with as much honesty and heart as I could muster. The thoughts more or less flowed and a thought piece that I felt honestly happy with came out. It even resonated with a few people.

But I then found it hard to do this consistently. My ideas trickled. And when I did feel like I had something, I would try to flesh it out, only to realize that it feels either derivative or insincere. I also struggled with wanting to secure myself an audience, not feeling what I had was worth ever sharing.

Seeking an answer to my dilemma, I showed up 10 minutes early to this conference, sitting right next to Tom.

Tom kindly introduced himself to me, said he didn’t believe we’d met, and asked me my name. I hesitate, debating whether I should bring up our brief interaction on Slack over 4 years ago when I was very much a novice writer. That interaction went like this: I asked a question in a channel, and he chimed in in the thread, and I reacted to his reply with a blushing fangirl emoji.

Given that I had completely forgotten what my original question even was, and that reacting to someone with a blushing fangirl emoji four years ago is not actually meaningful information, I decided not to mention it. I simply said my name and employer, though not before a palpable 2 second pause that was probably only briefly weird for everyone else involved but I inexplicably have to remember and share right now.

The discussion was lively and interesting, covering a wide range of topics: what tools to use, what kind of content to focus on, do you/how do you use AI, etc. I asked two questions during the discussion that were most important to me:

• How do you decide what you have is worth publishing?
• Once you publish something, do you try to get other people to read it? Do you care how it’s received?

As is with any hard questions, there are no silver bullet answers to either. To answer my own questions, Tom steered me to consider this other question first: Why do you want to write at all? Would you still write even if no one reads it?

I pause to consider this, missing a lot of the ongoing discussion that is still happening around me. It’s not that I haven’t thought about this, but I agree that I don’t have a super convincing answer right now. My only thought is that I am a writer and I write a lot for work, but not in a way that functions as a creative outlet, which, as someone whose title is a writer, I should have. This line of reasoning is saliently weak now that I am looking harder at it. Writing professional blogs doesn’t seem to be a meaningful creative outlet for me. And its base assumption isn’t even true: my title now is Senior Technical Content Engineer - it doesn’t have the word ‘writer’ in it anymore.

Realizing that unpacking this will take time, I put a pin in this train of thought and go back to listening to the discussion at the table. On the benefits of having a successful blog, Tom shared an anecdote about his experience interviewing at Google. He said that he had bombed the technical interview initially, but because the hiring team liked him so much, presumably because they read his blog, they didn’t fail him and gave him another chance, with another interview where he was mostly given soft-ball questions, eventually landing him the job.

Then it clicked: that is what I want my blog to do. I had been lying to myself that this was somehow a spiritual pursuit when really it was a material one. I want my blog to give me job security.

We are entering such an odd moment in tech job market history, where no one feels certain where their role is going. Being someone on a work visa, of course I want job security. But this is a different kind of goal than simple self-expression. The nature of this goal means I have to write for other people, specifically people who might one day give me a job, get them to read what I write and find it helpful consistently.

It would be great if I found this kind of writing to be personally fulfilling as much as my film reviews. However, if I am being honest, I simply do not at this moment. I write enough for others at work and I want my off-hour writing to be mostly for myself, not anyone else.

I sat with this for a few days to wrestle with the implications of this realization. Eventually, I decided that I probably won’t be focused on having a thought-leadership focused blog. It would take years of sustained output, if you are lucky, to get such a blog to a state that would make a meaningful difference in this job market. I don’t currently have the wherewithal to dedicate that to a style of writing I don’t intrinsically enjoy. For me right now, that energy is better spent learning than producing.

For now, my personal writing to job security pipeline would have to be more unconventional: I write stuff just for myself. Some of it will be personal and mildly unhinged like my Slack interaction with Tom that I had absolutely no reason to disclose, and some that others may find relatable. I put all of it out there regardless, in hopes that someone who might give me a job later will read it and find me to be such an interesting person that I’d be hired for my personality alone.

Maybe one day that will change, but this is the compromise I have reached with myself today. I look at this silly little post that in no way shows me being good at my job, except for right now when I say I promise I am, and feel that I would be happy that I wrote this even if it just remained in my Obsidian vault forever, which is precisely why I will feel good about sharing it tomorrow. It already did what I need it to do. If you read it and even find it to be a good read, it’s all just sprinkles from there.