There's Nothing Wrong With Blogging for Attention
16 Jun 2025 #writingI’m jumping into the online conversation about blogging expectations.
I found out about it on joelchrono’s blog. But somebody else started it. I can’t find those initial posts anymore.
Here’s what I expected from my blog
I started blogging to improve my coding.
That’s what Google recommended and I bought the idea. So in 2018, I started blogging to document my learning as a coder and the problems I was solving at work.
A couple of years after my first post, I added analytics with GoatCounter. And to my surprise, some people read my posts. Thanks, Google!
Then to increase my pageviews, I started to repost on dev.to and to share my posts on LinkedIn. That was the strategy I found to increase my blog traffic.
So I was writing:
- To document my journey,
- To please the SEO gods,
- To rank on Google first page, and
- To have people reading my posts.
I started with no plans, just to improve my coding skills. But I discovered SEO and a love for writing.
Blogging has given me a few moments of attention
Since then, my blog has done more for my career than a portfolio.
Apart from occasional virality and a bit of lunch money, my blog led to unexpected results:
- Getting my blog curated on Minifeed
- People on Reddit roasting one of my posts
- A reader compiling his favorite posts from my blog
- One of my blogging heroes reacting to one of my posts
- An interview going faster after I showed my unit testing posts
- One veteran coder emailing me after one of my posts going viral
- Readers emailing me to point typos or issues in my code samples
- One reader emailing me to share how one of my posts resonated with them
- Another writing hero tagging me in one of his posts after a discussion in the comments
Those unexpected moments showed me that my writing resonated with people. Sometimes I’m not writing into the void.
Even if I had to start over, I’d still blog. For my mental health and creativity. And yes, for a bit of attention.