My worst career decision, looked at clearly: not blogging or sharing content online.
Not blogging for the first eight or nine years of my career. Not writing up solutions when I figured something out. Not talking publicly about what I was learning. Not putting a name and a voice to the work I was doing every day.
I had reasons that felt solid at the time. I was not an expert. I did not have anything original to say. I was too busy. The things I was learning were probably obvious to everyone else already. Some version of this internal monologue runs in the background for most developers I know, and it kept me quiet for the better part of a decade.
What I Was Actually Doing
Let me be precise about the cost, because vague regret is not useful.
During those years I solved problems. I figured things out. I developed opinions about how software should be structured, how teams should work, what makes code readable and what makes it a tax on everyone who touches it. I accumulated roughly eight years of hard-won working knowledge.
And then I kept it entirely to myself.
Which means that when I eventually started writing, I was not contributing to a conversation — I was starting one, eight years late, from a standing start. I had no archive. No history of thinking publicly. No record of development. The professional credibility that comes from a visible body of work had to be built from scratch, in my mid-career, while also doing everything else a working developer does.
That is the actual cost of the decision. Not the loss of followers or metrics or any of the gameable surface-level stuff, but eight years of signal that evaporated because I never put it anywhere.
What Changes When You Write
Writing forces you to know what you think. This sounds obvious but it is genuinely not. I have sat down to write about topics I considered myself competent in and discovered, thirty minutes in, that my understanding was vague in precisely the places I thought it was solid.
Writing is thinking made visible, and visible thinking can be checked. By you first — and then by anyone who reads it. The feedback loop is slower than conversation but deeper than most code review.
Beyond the personal benefit: other people find it useful. The posts I was most reluctant to write — the ones where I thought surely everyone already knows this — have consistently been the most read, the most shared, the most likely to generate a message from someone saying I have been trying to find a clear explanation of this for months. The expertise gap between where you are and where you have been is a real asset. People learning what you recently figured out are not well-served by explanations from people who have known it so long they cannot remember not knowing it.
Writing also creates permanence. A solution you figured out in 2015 and wrote up is findable in 2026. A solution you figured out and kept in your head is not. Over a career, this compounds in ways that are hard to understate.
The Imposter Syndrome Tax
Most developers who do not write cite some version of imposter syndrome as the reason. I was not an expert. I did not have authority. Who was I to write about this?
Here is the thing about imposter syndrome and writing: it never goes away completely, but it stops being a valid objection after about five posts. The first time someone who is genuinely more experienced than you finds your post useful and tells you so, the "not expert enough" argument collapses. It turns out expertise is not binary and the people who need your posts are not the same people who would not need them.
The other thing: imposter syndrome is particularly bad at distinguishing between "I do not know enough to write about this topic with authority" and "I do not know everything about this topic." The second is always true. It has never stopped anyone worth reading.
What to Write When You Do Not Know What to Write
The easiest starting point: the problem you solved this week. Not an essay — a writeup. What the problem was, what you tried, what worked, why.
If you solved it by searching for answers online and not finding them until the third or fourth attempt, that is a post waiting to be written. Write the post you wished existed when you were searching.
Other reliable starting points:
- The concept you spent a week understanding that a good analogy would have made clear in an hour
- The decision you made on a project and the reasoning behind it
- The tool or library you adopted and would recommend — and why
- The practice you changed your mind about, and what changed it
None of these require expertise. They require having done the work, which you have been doing for years.
How to Actually Start
Tooling is not the constraint. A free WordPress.com blog, a dev.to account, a GitHub Pages site — any of these will do. Pick the one that requires the least friction to publish your first post and use that. You can move later if you outgrow it.
The constraint is psychological: the moment of deciding that your thoughts are worth making public. That decision is made once, the first time you publish. After that it becomes normal. The second post is easier than the first. The tenth is easier than the second.
Write a short first post. 300 words. Publish it imperfectly. The cost of being slightly less polished than you would like is essentially zero. The cost of not writing it is eight years of signal that helps no one, including you.
The Compounding That Happens After
The reason I call not starting the worst career decision I made is the shape of the compounding.
The first year of writing is mostly invisible. You are building a small archive that very few people find. This is normal and expected. The second year, search traffic starts to arrive — people finding old posts you have forgotten about. The third year, the archive has enough density that new posts publish into an existing context; readers who find one post explore others.
By year three or four, a consistent publishing record creates professional effects that are difficult to replicate any other way. Employers and clients find your work before they find your resume. Conference organisers take proposals more seriously when they can read your thinking. People who would not otherwise know you existed begin to.
None of this happens in the first year. All of it requires having started.
The Thing I Would Tell My Younger Self
Write the post. The one you have been thinking about writing for three months. The one you keep not writing because you are not sure it is good enough or original enough or worth anyone's time.
Write it anyway. Publish it imperfectly. Start today, or as close to today as you can manage.
The ten minutes of discomfort at the publish button is a small price for what comes after.