If you're in IT, I highly encourage you to write a blog.
Here are 17 reasons why you should be blogging.
🧵👇
1. Don't think of the blog as some new profound insight that makes you look smart. Instead, just write notes to yourself. If you make the blog useful to you, it'll be useful to others.
2. Throughout your career you'll stumble onto lots of great tips and advice and commands and tricks and ways to do thing. Blog all that. You will remember it better if you write it down. And it'll be easy for you to find it later.
3. You are in IT, so how's your web presence lookin? You know there are people who have a bigger web presence than you who live out on a farm and know nothing about computers? This is your passion. Show us what you can do!
4. Have you ever run into a problem, Googled for a solution but couldn't find one? You've gotta keep doing trial and error until you fix it. That's gold blog content. You'll have the only page on the internet with how to fix that problem, and maybe save lives.
5. Do you keep seeing people ask the same question over and over that is so obvious to you? Blog that. Then point people to it every time you see the question. Psst, your co-workers will bug you less if you point them to your super helpful blog posts that answers their questions.
6. The more you explain technical concepts to people. The better you'll get at understanding technical concepts yourself. Sounds backwards but it's true. Teach to learn.
7. The most underrated skill to have in IT is ability to communicate effectively. Blogging is leveling that skill up. Are people getting what they need efficiently and effectively when they land on your site? Can you explain the concepts even better? Rewrite it, level up.
8. If you're sending people to your blog and it's not helping them, learn why so you can do better. My system is to clearly state problem first, then write answer after. Then explain details and alternative solutions. Don't waste time with making people scroll for the answer.
9. If you find yourself having to Google answers to the same problem over and over, that's good blog content. Write down exactly how to solve that problem that's most effective for you, and it'll be faster to reference your own notes, and it'll be better suited to you.
10. Chances are, if you work in IT, the only people who know you're any good are your co-workers and customers. Blogging expands that and suddenly there are people all over the world who respect you and appreciate your skills. This can open a lot of doors for new possibilities.
11. Taking classes on a technology new to you? You're taking notes ya? Blog those notes! Trust me. Taking your notes from class and rewriting them into your blog will help you understand the content so much better, while helping others too. It's a magical thing.
12. Now once you start putting content out into the world. Some magic stuff happens. First people will start correcting you. It's inevitable. Don't take this negatively. Take it as an opportunity to learn how to do something even better or more thoroughly.
13. Strangers might write to you thanking you for helping them. And let me tell you, fan mail is one of the best drugs. Because it's pure and clean and feels great.
14. Did you know blogging was the precursor for my podcast? I blogged for 7 years before starting a podcast. It taught me how to write better, and produce content. It was from there that I got the idea and skills needed to podcast. Now I podcast full time. Blogs take you places.
15. If you blog for a while, you're now a content creator with an audience. Chances are the blog won't be the last thing you create. You can use your blog audience to seed your next project. My blog has been one of the best places to get new listeners for my podcast.
16. Bloggers can make money. You can put ads in your blog, get Brave rewards, or even just get tipped by random strangers.
17. Oh yeah and when you blog you have to solve all kinds of problems like domain registration, DNS servers, hosting, backups, web design, securing the site, and HTML/CSS/JS. The more you have your hands dirty in doing different IT stuff the more well rounded you'll be.
So to recap. By blogging you will become a better writer and communicator, learn the concepts better, open new opportunities, have a fantastic notebook for self reference, maybe make money, become appreciated by more people, and show off your IT skills.
So how do you get started? Try these: Wordpress, Jekyll, Ghost, Hugo, Medium, Wix, Squarespace. I really don't care what you use. Just jump in and start blogging. You can always move everything to a different place later. Good luck and I hope to see some new bloggers from this.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I have a lot of respect for Jack Conte (co-founder of Patreon) and his band Pomplamoose—he’s a brilliant, creative force. What he built with Patreon is groundbreaking. I was thrilled to be part of this movement to support creators directly. Thank you Jack, truly.
But over time, Patreon has gone through growing pains—and I’ve felt every single one of them.
1️⃣ The Security Team Scandal
In 2022, Patreon fired its entire internal security team. When this news broke, I lost a lot of patrons who didn’t feel safe keeping their financial data on a platform that appeared to be abandoning security.
Ironically, I wasn’t against this move. Patreon outsourced security to external experts—which was probably a smart decision. They wanted to focus on the product and let specialists handle security.
But here’s the problem: They botched the messaging completely.
The headlines made it sound like Patreon was ditching security altogether, and they never even tried to explain themselves well. That directly hurt my income because people left over bad optics rather than an actual risk.
20 lessons learned in my 10 years working as network security engineer. My job was to configure and manage firewalls for customers.
🧵👇
1. Always have a backout plan. If you're going to be making changes to production equipment, expect it to go all wrong one day and you'll be ok if you have a plan for that. If not you'll be burned.
2. Sometimes your role is just a therapist. And people just need to be reassured or to be listened to when they need to get something off their chest. These are the easiest problems to fix because all you gotta do is listen.
You. Yes you. You are the target of a massive disinformation campaign.
Corrupt, evil powers of the world do bad and nasty things. And their tactic is to then flood the world with tons of fake news. They don't have a good way to spin it, so they drown the truth. /thread
These evil powers will try to delegitimize journalists who report the truth. Journalists will be attacked, arrested, sometimes killed.
Journalists and investigators are on the front lines of this information war. And they're our only hope for finding the truth.
Inoculate yourself from this by recognizing where disinformation comes from and don't trust those sources.
And try not to be so outraged, fear driven, or believe everything you read or see. This knocks you off balance and distracts you.
Those of you who believe in free will. I have some questions for you.
1. When you suddenly wake up at 2am and can't stop thinking about work and can't go back to bed for hours and hours because your brain won't shut off. Would you say you have free will during that time?
2. When you really don't want to do something but you know you have to do it so you do it, would you consider that to be free will?
For instance suppose you're a parent and you've got a sick kid vomiting in their bed, all night. Then they wake you up at 6am hungry and needy.
3.Suppose there's something you know you should do but just aren't doing it. Like getting out of bed on time, or doing exercise, or cleaning the toilet. You know you should and you want to, but you just aren't. So if you want to but aren't doing it, where's the free will in that?
Yesterday Spotify bought Megaphone for $235 million.
Megaphone is my podcast hosting provider, so here are my thoughts.
/thread
Megaphone is unique in that it can do "dynamic ad insertion" (DAI). That is, I can swap ads in and out without having to mess with my original mp3 of the show. Just set a time mark of where an ad will go and it's stuck in. It's quite amazing technology.
Other Spotify acquisitions include:
Anchor (a podcast hosting provider) for $140 mil
Gimlet, a podcast network, for $200 mil
The Ringer, a podcast network, for $196 mil
It seems most shows on Gimlet and The Ringer host on Megaphone and use DAI.