Reasons for writing a blog

Who am I writing for?

Myself. I’m writing to force myself to get ideas out of my head. Having to explain my ideas will help make dig deeper and understand things I’m talking about better.

Others. I want to share my ideas, raise awareness on things I’m interested in, help others discover new things. It’s also a good starting point for discussions, and a very good way to have people point out the flaws in my thinking and make me learn faster.

Why am I creating a blog?

I want to talk about tech when I learn something new. I want to talk about the books I read.

Writing down my ideas will also help formulate them better, remember them better, but also acts as a kind of knowledge base I can come back to when I forget about something.

It is also a great opportunity to grow

What am I going to talk about?

Whatever comes up: tech (Go, Rust, code quality, software design), books (reviews or ideas raised from reading), freelancing, anything else that sparks my interest. I’m still considering splitting the blog into different sections (maybe with different subdomains): this would allow more freedom on what I write on, without discouraging potential readers when they come for tech an everything is about history, or the opposite. For now I simply created different categories that I still need to improve.

Why English?

I’m a French engineer living in Australia. About half of my professional network is French, and most of the other half is native English-speaking. There are a few reasons why I chose to write in English only.

Firstly, it is much more common for a French person to speak English or at least understand written English, than the opposite. The same goes for other language speakers: they are more likely to speak English than French as a second or third language.

Secondly, there isn’t really a gap to fill. There are plenty of very good French development and engineering blogs, so it’s not like I can get a whole new audience just for myself.

Thirdly, my closest colleagues speak perfect English or are native, my current employers speak better English than French, and I don’t plan on working in France in the near future so it is bound to stay the same, at least for some time.

And finally, my English is good enough to write blog posts, but it’s far from perfect. It’s a very good opportunity for me to practice my English writing skills. PLEASE correct me if my grammar is wrong, my spelling is incorrect or my formulations look weird.

Next steps

Once you decide to do something, you should start doing it immediately. Planning too much rarely helps, jumping right into it keeps you motivated.

You can check my progress in my next article, Setting up a blog.