I pursued my computer science education and eventually made it to Silicon Valley to write code and build unique products. Over the years, I realized that I learned almost 70% of the things over the internet. While pursuing an education in Computer Science did help build a foundation. Still, most of the practical knowledge came from reading and implementing ideas and tutorials from online blogs, forums, and StackOverflow.

It is interesting how many times you google search for a problem, and an answer pops up with a great explanation on someone's blog. It brings me to realize that blogging isn't just a way to tout the knowledge you have but does a morally good work of helping others. Don't you think it is better to write down a how-to or tutorial that took you may be hours or days to figure out the exact process? It can immensely save time for others. It is excellent to build good karma and show your expertise in a particular area of work. And if you throw in some non-intrusive ads, it could help pay some bills for the writers.

Being a software developer, as you progress in your career, a blog can come in handy to demonstrate expertise to potential employers or clients if you are consulting or freelancing. It also helps the other party understand how well you communicate. A senior software engineer at top tech companies is expected of you to be good at technical writing. Writing code is OK, but almost everything starts with a design review document, Especially when you are about to start something new or introduce significant changes that will involve many stakeholders. Documentation becomes extremely important, and an architect usually puts down everything in the form of essays and diagrams. It makes sharing ideas easy and works well to make iterative progress quickly as things in the software world change.

Blogging can be a great way to work on your long-form writing skills. In the world of increasing remote work, it can help you in being found and build an identity on the mighty internet. This thought brings me to list down the top blogging platforms for developers, so you have a place to start. By the end of this post, I hope you would have some idea on selecting the right platform for you.

1. Medium

Medium's platform is known for its fantastic writer's experience. It offers a very minimalistic user experience for an author to draft and publish their posts. It is my number one great place to start if you don't want to self-host your blog.

Here are a few benefits & caveats of using Medium for blogging.

Benefits:

1. Get a custom subdomain for your publication. Example, techbum.medium.com
2. Ability to use your domain name but it is a paid feature.
3. Show up in Medium curated recommendations to readers who are interested in the niche.
4. Contribute to other publications connected to Medium. Example, I have contributed to Freecodecamp publication on Medium. Although, Freecodecamp is now publishing independently and not hosted by Medium.
5. Become a Medium partner enabled you to paywall your content for premium subscribers. Thereby you get paid based on the number of reads on your content.

Caveats:

1. Too much competition. Medium has authors writing on just about all topics one can think of like software, travel, social, lifestyle, business etc. It could be challenging to show up in recommendations.
2. There is no Ads model. So you cannot monetize your blog with custom Ad networks like Adsense, Ezoic or Mediavine.
3. Publications like Freecodecamp moved away from Medium because it promotes too much of the paid content and hence doesn't work for everyone.
4. Medium Partner program supports only limited number of countries.

2. TechBum

TechBum's community is growing, providing any new writer with a unique opportunity to grow with it. With TechBum, I am in the process of building a content niche around people into software development and tech blogging. It includes building a community of members that propel each other to grow as developers and enable mentorship opportunities.

Benefits:

1. Publish content that reaches a niche audience interested in tech.
2. Get direct mentorship from me (as an experienced software engineer). And this won't be about just content writing but also in the form of career advice.
3. Get Paid! If you are interested in becoming an author at TechBum, email me. I want to make it worth it for the contributors.
4. In addition to featuring your content on TechBum, it will be shared with our community Newsletter.
5. We will make sure the content is SEO optimized to be found by ranking in the search results.

Caveats:

1. No way to add your domain name.

3. Dev.to

Dev.to is also a community of developers, albeit a pretty famous one lately. Here is TechBum's profile on dev.to. I plan to use it mainly for cross-posting content and link back to TechBum.

Benefits:

1. Overall a good community to start with. I see a lot of JavaScript developers writing here. Mainly, because many start with JS as their first language to start working on both frontend and backend development.
2. Recommendation system similar to Medium or like any other blog.

Caveats:

1. No way to monetize your content directly by putting ads or pay-walling content. Although is another way called "Web Monetization" but not many know about this yet.
2. A lot of tutorial-type content and content on doing something with specific programming languages.
3. No way to add your own domain name like Medium.

4. HashNode

HashNode is the latest platform that is picking up slowly. They also recently closed a seed funding round of $2.1M. Although similar to Dev.to, HashNode provides additional good features.

Benefits:

1. Supports mapping custom domain names to HashNode blog.
2. Provides Newsletter capabilities.

Caveats:

1. Doesn't support Ads or paywalling of content. HashNode supports Web Monetization framework similar to dev.to that not many people know about.

5. Self-Hosted

If you plan to Self-host a blog you need to first decide on a Content Management System. WordPress is one of the oldest in the game and has become bloated. For TechBum, I use self-hosted open-source Ghost CMS. I use a DigitalOcean droplet to host TechBum and you can get started by using their one-click install for Ghost.

To Conclude...

I hope this article helps you in making the right decision to start blogging as a developer. Here's Google Search Console stats overview for TechBum.

Imagine how fast it can grow from here with more good quality content. All you have to do is write about what you know and people will come! Because there are millions of other curious folks like you and me, ready to soak in knowledge from wherever they can.