alt Hacker NewsI want to write technically interesting posts like this too, but I don't know how.
My writing is mostly just tracking various internet posts to trace history. How do you create interesting posts based on personal experience like this?
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lately I've been thinking about how something on reddit/hn/lobsters reminds me of an interesting moment from my career, and I write up a small reply about it, and that could conceivably also be a blog post if only I had a blog. and then I do nothing about it :) but that's definitely one way to blog; just take the effort to follow through on random inspirations like that.
another great route to follow is what julia evans does on her blog [https://jvns.ca/] - a lot of the posts are "hey, I learnt something new today, and here it is!". the key point is that there is no attempt at having every post be the same "weight", some of them are deep dives into a topic and some are just passing thoughts or howtos.
well first you have personal experiences like that
or rather: you have personal experiences like whatever your experiences are like, not like theirs, and then you write about them if you think anyone else would also be interested.
Write what you know. If you don't know, learn.
Most people I know keep "journals" (in various ways and shapes) when they're working on stuff. Producing something for public consumption becomes "compile my already existing stuff and writing into a presentable thing" rather than "start writing from zero".
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I looked up your blog and it is clear you have a deep interest for explaining ideas and programming techniques. That's great, there's passion! I even found that you've written about some things close to my own heart:
https://www.makonea.com/en-US/blog/Pokemon-Red-and-the-Evolu...
Looking through it I learned some cool stuff - I had no idea about this.
However, there's one piece of advice which seems applicable to most technical writing I saw on this blog, especially the Pokémon FSM one:
You need to work on pacing and length. The core issue is very broad scope. Think carefully about your target audience and the key insight you want to communicate. Then narrow your scope to communicating only what is necessary for that idea, skipping things your target audience can be assumed to already understand. The writing will automatically get snappier and more engaging.
If you want to explain the FSM script engine in Pokémon you have to assume the reader is somewhat familiar with programming and won't need a primer on registers. Otherwise you're writing a low-level programming primer, not an article about a clever technique in a video game.