Write the post you wish you'd found

serviceberry

The corollary is that if you find that post, say something. Drop the author a note, leave a comment. No one else does. For every YT celebrity, there are thousands of people posting good content on the internet and not knowing if it's being seen or appreciated by anyone.

elashri

One of the reasons I avoid commenting on YouTube whatsoever is the risk that an automated filter flags my comment and then nuke the whole account.

This idea seems similar. I have some accounts on social media that is being used for read-only. That's unfortunate reality.

ketzo

The ~3 times this has ever happened to me, it made my week. Cannot recommend enough.

gpjt

That's an excellent point! Every author needs to know they're not posting into a void.

pfych

Whenever I fix something or struggle with an issue I ALWAYS write myself a blog post and make sure to cram in the exact errors/SEO Keywords I searched for while trying to glue together a solution.

gblargg

Something I wish I had done more. You think you don't need to make a note because it's fresh in your head at the time, but years later, even the context is gone. Expecting to remember arcane solutions to things you do rarely is unrealistic. I've gotten better but still have a ways to go. One thing that removes the barrier is to just have common log to put everything, perhaps with some tags, so you can quickly open it and type your thoughts when they're fresh, without having to worry about packaging it just right.

tombert

Two days ago, I was looking on how to get Gamescope working with a new computer on NixOS. I searched around, and found a Reddit post about it [1], found that they had a Github Gist attached to it, and then realized that I was the guy who posted it. I had completely forgot that I had done this work already.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1dahr3g/steamos_base...

lazyasciiart

My most useful stack overflow answer is one where I barely knew what I was doing (something back in MVC.net) and while I managed to fix the problem, which was the same as the one asked about, I didn’t understand any of the marked “best answers” or how they were relevant, so i wrote out how I’d fixed it in “I clicked here and typed this to match that” terms. Much later I knew enough to realize that of course my answer was exactly what those other answers were saying to do, but mine still got buckets of votes from all the other poor folk googling without having yet understood the bindings and views and magic connections between pieces that Visual Studio was making.

bsimpson

Same with posting questions - try to include all the things you searched for, so when it gets answered, the next person can find it.

solarized

I also do this.

Still don’t know how to respond when i get fucked by LLM authoritarians (Grok, ChatGPT, etc.).

They don’t give the traffic back / incentives or even cite us as the source. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

neilv

I'm imminently posting one such Web page, which took me many person-days to figure out, when I couldn't find the info.

Posting is actually delayed because I'm experimenting with how to do this more sustainably than I have in the past. Which means generating dollars somehow, and also making it harder for "AI" crawlers and services to rip off everything. :(

Brajeshwar

These days, there is always someone who has already written what I wanted to write. So, I write my own version. In the early days, most of my blog posts were inspired by questions on public forums. I reply there and then write a blog post, and then, I just point them to my blog. The articles from my blog from the early 2000s reflect all of that.

For instance, the article on how to open a browser full-screen from IE5 was a roaring success. https://brajeshwar.com/2002/ie-50-full-screen-from-itself/

alpb

I'm working one of such blog posts as we speak. Past few months I've been purely publishing articles in my domain (Kubernetes) that go really deep into things that I've discovered the hard way, or code walkthroughs in OSS codebases.

yjftsjthsd-h

> Past few months I've been purely publishing articles in my domain (Kubernetes) that go really deep into things that I've discovered the hard way

Could I ask for a link?

azundo

Looking through the submission history of that user yields https://ahmet.im/blog/index.html

kreelman

Well done. Great you've got time for that. Thanks.

mhlakhani

This echoes well. The most popular posts on my blog are things where I wrote things for myself (e.g. reflections on my career), rather than trying to orient them for an audience or maximum clicks.

runevault

Always good advice to put back into the world to help those who come after. I've made a few videos in the past to explain things I know others struggled with in Godot and every time someone finds one of them and thanks me for making the concept of the video make sense it puts a smile on my face.

swyx

amen, my own journey/version here. most powerful career insight ive ever had, when reflecting on why my career transition from finance to tech went so well. https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public

RajT88

I post the occasional Medium article about technology and DIY projects.

I wrote a post like this once - an article I wish someone else had written and posted. It has hundreds of views - a steady dozen or so a week. It's too bad I don't have more content like this where I figured out a thing which was largely undocumented.

zem

julia evans is really good at doing that. can recommend her blog, both for knowledge and for inspiration: https://jvns.ca/.

tombert

I haven't blogged in quite awhile, and I don't know why. I've done what everyone has done and started five or six blogs and then abandoned them, but never more than that.

Anyone who has seen my HN history knows that I'm not averse to writing out large quantities of text spouting out my dumb opinions on things, and I don't think I'm a terrible writer or anything. I think at least some of my longer HN comments could be converted into blog posts with just a little effort, but for whatever reason it has never really stuck with me.

I guess part of it is that HN is a lot more conversational, or at least when I write a comment here, I'm writing it either a) in response to someone or b) with the expectation that someone might respond to me. For whatever reason, having that bit of social interaction (with the relatively technical and educated audience of HN) is enough to lower the barrier for me to write something.

I think if I already had a blog that was relatively popular, I'd also find it easier to get into the mood to write a more organized blog post, if for no other reason then there would be an automatic minimum-interest in whatever I write and then it would feel less like I'm shouting into the void.

shadowgovt

This is the only reason I have a blog. It's letters to myself when I find one of those in-the-gap-between-systems problems and want to describe how to fix it.