Most developers who start a blog quit after two posts. Not because they run out of things to say, but because the setup gets in the way: picking a platform, wrestling with a CMS, figuring out SEO, or just staring at a blank editor with no plan for what comes next.
This guide is the fix for that. It's a working system for developer blogging — what to write, where to publish it, and how to make sure the right people actually find it. Everything below links out to a deeper, standalone guide, so treat this page as the map and come back to it whenever you need the next step.
Why developers should blog at all
A technical blog does three things a resume and a GitHub profile can't:
It proves you can explain things. Writing about a bug you fixed or a system you designed shows judgment, not just output. Hiring managers and future collaborators read code, but they trust explanations.
It compounds. A well-written post on a real problem — a Postgres migration gone wrong, a race condition you tracked down, a library you evaluated — keeps getting found on Google for years after you wrote it. Unlike a tweet or a Slack thread, it doesn't disappear.
It builds your own reference library. Half of technical blogging is writing the post you wish existed when you were debugging something at 2am. Six months later, you're the one searching for it — and it's yours.
What to actually write about
The posts that perform best for developers aren't tutorials copied from the docs — they're specific, opinionated, and grounded in something you actually did. A few reliable formats:
The postmortem. What broke, why, and what you changed. Specificity is what makes these good — real error messages, real timelines, real trade-offs.
The comparison. You evaluated two tools or approaches and picked one. Readers searching for that decision want your reasoning, not a marketing page.
The "how I built X" walkthrough. Not a full tutorial — just the architecture and the two or three decisions that mattered.
The checklist or reference. Something you'd bookmark yourself: a setup guide, a checklist, a cheat sheet for a workflow you repeat often.
For a deeper breakdown of structure, tone, and how to avoid the "wall of text" trap, see How to write technical blog posts.
Choosing where to write
Before formatting or SEO, you need a place to actually put the words. Two decisions matter here.
Editor: Markdown or Notion? Markdown-first tools keep your posts in plain text files you can version in git, diff, and move between platforms freely. Notion is faster to start in and easier to collaborate in, but locks your content into its own format. See Markdown vs Notion for blogging for the full trade-off.
Platform: where does it live? This is the decision most developers get stuck on. Full write-up in Best developer blogging platforms, but the short version is that your options cluster into three groups:
- Static site generators (Astro, Hugo, Jekyll) that you own and self-host
- Hosted blogging platforms (Ghost, Medium, dev.to) that trade ownership for convenience
- Purpose-built tools like Blogizi that let you write in Markdown locally and publish straight from your terminal, with SEO handled for you
If you're deciding between a fully custom static site and a managed option, Astro blog vs Blogizi and GitHub Pages vs Blogizi both walk through the real trade-offs — setup time, hosting, maintenance, and how much SEO plumbing you have to build yourself.
Getting found: the technical SEO layer
Writing the post is half the job. The other half is making sure it's structured so search engines — and readers — can actually find it. This is the part most developer blogs skip, and it's usually why good posts get zero traffic.
The full breakdown lives in the Technical SEO checklist, but at minimum, every post needs:
Open Graph images, so links look right when shared on Slack, Twitter/X, or LinkedIn instead of showing a blank card. Covered in How to add OG images.
An RSS feed, so readers and aggregators can subscribe without you building anything custom. Covered in RSS feed guide.
A sitemap, so search engines discover new posts quickly instead of waiting to crawl your homepage and follow links. Covered in Sitemap guide.
Get these three right once, and every post you publish afterward inherits them for free.
Making it sustainable
The biggest failure mode in developer blogging isn't bad writing — it's friction. If publishing means opening a CMS, uploading images by hand, and fighting a WYSIWYG editor, most people write two posts and stop.
The fix is to keep the whole loop as close to your existing workflow as possible: write in Markdown, in your editor, in a repo you already have open — then publish with one command. See Blogging from your terminal for what that workflow looks like end to end, from draft to a live, SEO-formatted post.
Where to start
If you're starting from zero, the order that works:
- Pick an editor and platform — Markdown-based, so your posts are portable (Markdown vs Notion for blogging, Best developer blogging platforms).
- Set up the technical basics once — OG images, RSS, sitemap (Technical SEO checklist).
- Write your first post about something you actually did this month — a bug, a decision, a build. Use How to write technical blog posts as your structure.
- Publish, then repeat. The second post is always easier than the first.
The goal isn't a perfect blog. It's a repeatable one.