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I always ask this question of myself occasionally, and sometimes quite frequently. Somewhat more now that blogging has reverted to a hobby rather than directly a vocation. The other night, as I was sitting at my desk at 12:30 AM writing a blog about regular expressions, I had a crisis of conscience. I had originally sat down to do a bit of formatting, then I was going to finish watching the show I had started at the gym. Now I was actually going to bed later than I had even planned.

Then I had this thought: “Is this really worth it?”

One of the reasons I am not the greatest influencer in the world is I hate leaving obvious things hanging. It is barely a spoiler alert that having written 400+ blogs in my life that I believe it to be worth it. But this wasn’t the only night I was sitting up late writing a blog (as I am doing the same thing putting the finishing touches on this blog!).

But the reasons sometimes don’t come right to me when I really just want to sleep or even simply lean back on my couch and watch other people having adventures on the glorious glowing rectangle that resides in the same room with me.

Sometimes I need reminding, and maybe this will spark an interest in you if you are on the fence about starting your own blog.

Professional Reasons (AKA Marketing)

The number one reason I suggest people write a blog is that it becomes a very strong part of your resume. Add in a solid LinkedIn page and a good blog, and together these will tell a lot about a person’s skills and personality. By reading someone’s blog, you can tell what they know about one or more topics (for good or for bad), and these days it can give you an idea of how they make use of AI, another thing that can be a pro and a con.

All of this is part of marketing yourself. Something you may not care to do all the time like I do, but when you need a job, all the marketing yourself have done prior to that need will be your friend. Well, hopefully your friend.

Remember that everything you do on the internet becomes a part of your marketing. I don’t completely love the whole concept of branding yourself, but whether I like it or not, it happens. In your writing, it is important to be your real self, just be the best version of that self you can need to get your point across.

What “best version of yourself” means to you is really up to you, just know it matters, and some people may not like the real self that tells off people for not reading the entire Internet before asking a question.

Documenting your work…for later

As much as your employer will let you, blogging about things you work on is a great way to preserve the general knowledge you have. Need to back up a database? You wrote a script. Obviously, you need to remove all private information and any proprietary algorithms, but 90% of the work of a programmer is usually done on very common things. It is how you put those things together for a client that is what they are paying for.

As an example, just a few weeks into my new job, my boss asked me to get the size of a set of databases. No doubt I could write this query again with some time, but I went and searched my old blogs to see if I had written before. I had quite a few years ago, and it still worked like a charm with only a little bit of cleanup from some old formatting. (I am not sharing it because it really needs formatting and I am not sure getting it formatted will be possible. If not I will be putting it out here on my new blog some day.

Of course, not every bit of code you wrote 10 years ago will work as is, but the principles are likely the same.

Doing my bit in the community

If I don’t know how to do something I am trying to do, there is likely another person out there in the same boat. If there is something I didn’t know at some point, there are lots of people in that same boat.

The best part about blogging is that not only can you help people out, it is the second cheapest form of community involvement possible to get started on. (Answering questions on Reddit, Stack Overflow is cheapest).

There are plenty of platforms to blog on, and some are even free. A simple, but effective WordPress site with no ads and a custom domain like this site can be $60 a year. Or you can use Github Pages and create a site completely free (it is a bit more manual, and I personally didn’t want to fiddle with all of the setup stuff since I knew WordPress pretty well).

All you need from there is a text editor, and I do a lot of my non-code blogs in iCloud notes. I use markdown for formatting, then just paste the formatted text into a new post (sometimes using a formatted editor like Notes I may have to remove formatting first). I will blog about this later, but my point here is that it is easy.

The final one for now: Habit

Over the years the blogging habit has ebbed and flowed from obsession to a semi-regular habit. But this last year I really got myself going again with blogging at least weekly. Once you get the habit going you really start to like the feeling of seeing your own blogs coming out, even on a new site that hasn’t yet even really appeared on search engines. It can be cathartic too, as you can (in a very professional manner!) let off steam and teach other people how to not make the same mistakes you have.

It helps when you can find a slate of topics to talk about like this year with SQL Server 2025 coming out this year. This has opened up topics that I want to learn about, and will probably teach at least a few people about someday. But for every person who thinks “everybody know that”, there are approximately 10002 people who are like “I didn’t know that. Cool!”

Summary

While blogging can feel very much like work (unpaid work at that), it has a lot of benefits that just get more and more important as time passes. Everyone’s value will be different, but even if you don’t promote or even publish your blogs, you will gain value for your career.

It is absolutely no guarantee of any future success, but it certainly can’t hurt if you do your own work and teach people stuff that they need to know. Even if you aren’t the first to do it.

In the future, I will dig deeper into why and how to write blogs if you are new at it. But I will say this: 90% of what makes a technical blog valuable is the technical details. Good, interesting writing helps, but I don’t go to a blog on database backups for anything other than information about how to back up a database. If it helps, that is a great blog. If it helps and it is a well-written piece, that is more the better. But a well-written, interesting blog that makes no sense technically is valueless.