From where I'm standing at the end of 2024, the written word seems to be in a bad way. The currently hot thing is for AI to automate "creative" pursuits like writing, design, coding, art, and video production. The main theme of everything you read is that we are standing at a precipice where AI is about to completely change the world and there's nothing we can do about it.

I'm here to argue that blogging (that is, writing and publishing a public web log) is still incredibly valuable to you as a programmer. It can make you a better and more valuable team member, and improve future job searches.

At least take notes

One thing I have noticed about good developers over my career is that they tend to keep notes. Sometimes this will take the form of a physical notebook or diary. For convenience, lots will keep a text file that they just keep adding to. Space is relatively cheap, and you don't even have to remember to pack a floppy disk.

The benefits of doing this include:

• Skillsmaxxing. It gets easier to write documentation, emails, user stories, and everything else when you're in the habit of writing regularly. Writing is a skill, and keeping it sharp is arguably as important or more important than your ability to write code. Especially if we're going to let the AI models do all of that, right?

• Searchability. Obviously, having your ideas in digital text form is going to let you grep them. But your brain actually has better connectivity when you physically write stuff down, too. Think of daily note-taking as building your own personal search index.

• Getting the next job. It's easy to forget your wins, losses, and learnings if you don't pause and think about them and write them down every day. There's good reason to collect this info for yourself, and it's most valuable when you need to update your resume. This is the worst possible task if you're a normal human who finds writing HR fluff about yourself distasteful. But it is so much easier when you have a bunch of good notes about what you did in a particular position. Think about the worst case scenario, where you've just been laid off and your access to all your company stuff is gone in a flash. I bet you'd wish you had some personal notes at that point, right?

But really, blog in public

So far, all the benefits of writing that I've listed can be yours whether you choose to publish your writing in public or not. But I would push you to do the hard thing and make your writing public. When you publish a blog of your learnings and musings, you get the side benefit of a free personal brand.

Right now, the job market for programmers is not so great, especially after so many boom years where it was easy to find dev jobs. Imagine a hypothetical scenario where a poor HR homie is trying to decide whether to sort you into the rejection pile or to push you further down the job application path. Will having a public blog that shows off all of your development knowledge, cool projects you've been working on, and great personality hurt? (It will not hurt.)

I have had the pleasure of hiring a few developers in my last few positions. Do you know which developers routinely got hired? It wasn't the ones with the most impressive university name on their diploma or the biggest company name in their last role. It was always the ones who just happened to have a personal website with a blog and a great public GitHub profile. These aren't deciding factors, and it's possible to get by without them, but do yourself the favor, please! Caring about this kind of thing is shorthand for, "I'm one of the good ones."

What if you had to go pro some day?

Imagine a scenario where you find yourself either out of a job entirely or with your hours and pay cut back. All of a sudden you have a bunch more time on your hands and a skill set that you need to start marketing. Wouldn't you prefer to have an existing website with readership and a Google presence to start from?

This is, unfortunately, not impossible to imagine in this job market. What if you spent a few minutes a week blogging and helped future-proof your ability to market yourself if you needed to? Would you feel better or worse knowing you could throw a post up on your blog saying you're looking for work, knowing other developers read and like your stuff?

The best time to plant a tree was always twenty years ago, and the second best time is right now. Get to it!

Developer blog inspo

If you need some ideas of what a good development blog could look like, check out these classics:

• David Heinemeier Hansson is "the Rails guy" and a real live wire when it comes to blogging about open source development.
• Marcy Sutton is a web accessibility expert and great communicator.
• Martin Fowler's site hosts legendary articles about software architecture, microservices, and refactoring.