Blogging is dead!? You shouldn’t start a blog, nobody would read it. This opinion I heard a lot from my friends, and online communities did confirm this thought. However, I don’t believe that it is true actually.
In this first blog post I give 5 reasons for why blogging is still relevant in 2025 even with those fancy LLMs. And introduce my thought process for starting my own blog.
#1 Learning from other’s Experience
Let’s be honest, learning could be time-intensive. Therefore, learning from experienced people who already solved the problem and could explain it to you. If you think about it that is actually what educational systems tries to accomplish. However, in schools the path cannot be extensive or specific, since the objective is to give you basics and let you figure out other things on your own.
My point is that for specific engineering topics, think of radio technologies or certain algorithm you need for your project’s problem with it’s specific conditions, you need information from resources outside your classes.
#2 LLMs are great at reasoning for disillusion, confusion, and confirmatory-bias
Critical thinking becomes I believe one of the key skills in the current world of Artificial Intelligence. I mean the current tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and many others, are really impressive. Okay, sure the models do still make basic mistakes we humans can obviously spot. However, I believe that for specific tasks and proper use of prompt engineering principles. You could leverage significant productivity output, since basic boilerplate code base you could set-up within seconds. Ofcourse, just keep the decision making power to yourself and don’t blindly believe the output.
Especially when you are still learning yourself, your judgement is not yet at the level of distinguising whether the model’s output is good or total nonsense.
#3 Personal Reflection and Growth
Blogging allows you to reflect on your learning and growth. Writing about your experiences and challenges helps you to process and internalize what you have learned. It also provides a record of your progress over time, which can be incredibly motivating and rewarding.
I love watching back ones in a time at my early projects. Most of the times I am really in a fit of laughter, since I spot within seconds some serious issues. Or even read the logs of open problems and instantly have a “Aha! Ofcourse that’s why it didn’t work yet.” moment. I truly cannot explain the feeling you get from experiencing the fulfilment of these moments. It is a weird mix of reflecting back, nostalgia effect, and motivation to keep going on this track.
#4 Building a Personal Brand
In today’s digital age, having an online presence is crucial. Blogging helps you build your personal brand and showcase your expertise. The time of going to a good school only is not enough, if want to excel at the highest potential I believe. It allows you to share your knowledge and insights with a wider audience, which can open up new opportunities for collaboration, networking, and career advancement. I like the principle of “It’s not what you know, but who you know”, and I believe that you should put-in the effort to share your thoughts first.
#5 Contributing to the Community
Sharing your personal insights from the concepts you’re currently learning is a way of contributing back to the community. The more engagement, the better. By sharing your experiences and knowledge, you can help others who are facing similar challenges and contribute to the collective learning of the community.
Above all, I believe that by contributing back innovation is boosted in the most efficient manner. Sure commercialization is also important since investments need to be payed back with their corresponding reward for the taken risks. Still, these two interest are really not at the contrary of each other. But I this is a topic for another blog post.
My Personaly Story and process
I like to storytell the steps I took during the setting-up my blog. Therefore I would like to construct my thinking steps as an addition.
Personal Motivation
Many times during studying, or working on projects I wondered the following: “I solved a certain problem and its worth sharing it, but it is not relevant for the project’s documentation.” What could I do in these situations? Well maybe blogging is a good way?
- Share insights that I collected.
- Reconnect with my content-creation hobby. Sharing my personal insights from the concepts I’m currently learning is my way of contributing back to the community. The more engagement, the better.
Decision-Making
Therefore, I thought why not start blogging. Now I had to make a decision about in what way do I want to start blogging:
- On a platform: There are amazing platforms out there, like LinkedIn Medium, Quora, Instructables, stackoverflow-subpages and many others.
- Content-Management website: Start my own website using WordPress, HubSpot Content Hub, or Drupal.
- Hosting and developing website: Creating a lightweight and simple website I did consider, in my teenage years I was playing around with Javascript and ReactJS framework. But yeah… There is a reason why I chose for Engineering instead.
Okay, writing on a platform was a good option for me. Especially as a LinkedIn fanatic, but still I don’t like the dependency of a platform. They can change their ecosystem or even close it altogether some day, and leave me with troubles. WordPress was for me logical option if I didn’t want to work on a platform. Since I have set-up WordPress websites a couple of times before, I do have experience and could do it in a couple of hours. But I just don’t like maintaining it (PHP packages just hurt me badly) and the extensive overwhelming ecosystem. I just want to be able to quickly share my thoughts.
Now I established what I didn’t want to do. And then I lost interest and just accepted that I couldn’t share tricks without damaging my productivity. But then I discovered GitHub Pages in combination with Jekyll, and wow it blew away in how conveniently it seemed.
What I really liked was the idea of just writing markdown files, or even plain LaTeX! And Jekyll just makes a blog out of it. Damn, finally something that I could easily integrate into my current workflow and still keep my time for important work.
Conclusion
In conclusion, blogging remains a relevant and valuable activity for developers even in the age of advanced AI tools like ChatGPT. It offers numerous benefits, including learning from others’ experiences, developing critical thinking skills, personal reflection and growth, building a personal brand, and contributing to the community.
My personal journey into blogging was driven by the desire to share insights, reconnect with my content-creation hobby, and contribute back to the community. After considering various platforms and content management systems, I found GitHub Pages combined with Jekyll to be the perfect solution. It allows me to write in markdown or LaTeX and seamlessly integrate blogging into my workflow without compromising productivity.