Where Did All the Tech Bloggers Go?

The other day I noticed I don’t follow any tech bloggers personally anymore. Some of that may be the rise of social media and aggregator sites filling the void but the bigger reason I think is that I haven’t been seeking out individuals to follow since around the time Coding Horror stopped blogging regularly. It’s a bit of a shame really since I think you can learn a lot by following individuals and seeing their own progression arc.

So I went on a mission to go searching for people writing about things I’m interested in that post semi regularly. That turned out to be quite the little side quest. One does not just simply search “tech bloggers” and find anything good. I mostly found these by finding comments on threads asking who people follow and doing some breadth first search.

• Dan Luu
• Martin Fowler
• Troy Hunt
• Gergely Orosz (Pragmatic Engineer)
• Jake Lazaroff
• Paul Graham
• Sam Who
• Werner Vogels (All Things Distributed)
• Engineer’s Codex
• Julia Evens
• Xe Iaso
• Anil Dash
• Alex Papadimoulis (The Daily Wtf)
• Patrick McKenzie (Kalzumeus)
• Lea Verou

These are shuffled every page load to give everyone a fair shake :) You might have noticed like I did that we need more diversity in the list so if you’re a non-stereotypical techie that has a blog (or know someone who does) please let me know!

As I was thinking about this topic I decided to make it my mission to start blogging regularly as well. As of this post being released my public goal is to publish one post per week until I make it to 100 posts. Ideally some weeks getting two. There’s a few sources of the goal: personal development to improve my writing and communication skills, improve my focus (I’ve been so distracted even just writing this post under the guise of “research” 😬), but mainly to try and give back to the dev community as much as I can with what I’ve picked up in my 14 year career so far (this definitely makes me feel a bit old).

The topics will hopefully be applicable to a diverse engineering audience but with a tilt towards the younger full stack web development crowd since that’s where I came from.

Curious where the number 100 come from in the goal? Read this post:

Imagine the project you stopped working on months or years ago. Maybe for me, it’s the podcast. Imagine where you’d be today if you would have kept going.

Close your eyes for a brief moment as you do this.

You’re still reading this you rule breaker — I said close your eyes.

Really think about it.

Now, think about something you’re starting today. Maybe it’s chess or a newsletter or a business or even a relationship. Maybe it’s a blog or a hobby like guitar.

I want you to imagine yourself 10 years from now, and picture how great you’ll be at that thing. Think about how much you’ll have progressed at it. How much success you’ll have. How grateful you are that you didn’t give up.

That was pretty nice, wasn’t it?

The secret to getting better at something is just doing it over and over, trying to get a little bit better each time. You’ll be surprised at the results (more on that in a later post)

If you’d like to come along for the ride with me I’d be eternally grateful if you signed up for the email notifications below. You’ll be part of the exclusive first members when this thing takes off ;-)

Cheers

—Dillon