Why Top Tech Bloggers Keep Writing: Insights from 14 Industry Voices

Over the past year, we conducted in-depth interviews with fourteen prominent tech bloggers—some of whom have been writing online for nearly two decades—to understand what drives their commitment to content creation. Their answers reveal a fascinating spectrum of motivations, from career acceleration to personal growth to genuine passion for teaching. Here’s what these accomplished writers shared about their blogging journey.

The Career Catalyst: From Visibility to Opportunity

Several bloggers credit their early writing efforts with opening unexpected doors. Aaron Francis initially launched his blog as a promotional tool for a product that never gained traction. Yet the real value emerged differently: “I started getting interest from people that wanted me to work for them, either as a freelancer or as a full-time employee. What a cheat code it is to have a public body of work that people can passively discover.”

Eric Lippert, who began blogging more than two decades ago while at Microsoft, tapped into a different professional advantage. Working on developer tools, he recognized that blogging could humanize the company’s reputation. “The perception was that Microsoft was impersonal, secretive, and uncommunicative,” he recalls. “When blogging took off in the early 2000s, we saw an opportunity to show a more open, empathetic face.” His blog, “Fabulous Adventures in Coding,” eventually became one of MSDN’s most popular individual-run publications.

Phil Eaton was refreshingly candid about his initial motivation: “My shameless goal was to become a regular on the front of Hacker News because I sensed it would boost my career.” After transitioning to management in 2017, his perspective shifted. He began viewing writing as a tool for deep learning and solidifying understanding—a realization that writing offers professional benefits beyond algorithmic favor from platforms.

Matt Butcher stumbled upon his audience by accident. In the early 2000s, he posted basic tutorials on technologies like sed without any analytics awareness. When a friend set up Google Analytics years later, Butcher was shocked: “My blog had a ton of traffic, and some of the most basic posts were perennially popular.” The lesson? Sometimes the simplest content resonates most broadly.

Knowledge Sharing at Scale

For many contributors, blogging represents a democratized form of mentorship. Gunnar Morling articulates this beautifully: “Instead of writing things down just for myself, I could make these notes available so others could benefit.” His motivations span multiple dimensions—capturing personal learning (how to prevent replication slot issues in Postgres), exploring emerging technologies (Java, Apache Kafka), and distilling years of experience into accessible guides.

Tanel Poder established his blog on June 18, 2007 as “a lookup table for my future self.” He uploaded open-source troubleshooting tools and documented complex scenarios. The practical payoff? “When I visited a customer to solve a problem, we could copy and paste relevant scripts from my blog. I didn’t need to show up with a USB stick.”

Preston Thorpe discovered that writing deepens technical comprehension: “Writing an in-depth blog post about a feature or problem solved allows me to fully absorb and understand it even better than just implementing it.” This dual benefit—personal mastery plus public contribution—appears throughout these interviews.

The Personal Growth Narrative

Charity Majors describes blogging as her external resume of human development. “There are very few things I am prouder of than the body of writing I’ve developed over the past 10 years. When I look back, I can see myself growing, my mental health improving, becoming more empathetic, less reactive.” She maintains a yearly goal of publishing roughly one longform piece monthly, treating her archive as evidence of maturation.

Thorsten Ball, who published his first post in 2012 about implementing autocompletion with Redis, reflects on writing as thinking: “Writing is thinking. I like sitting down and ordering my thoughts to write something. The feelings of ‘I want to write’ and ‘I want to really think through this topic’ are similar for me.” Today, through his newsletter Register Spill, he continues channeling this impulse while maintaining ownership over his audience independent of platform volatility.

Sam Rose started blogging in 2011 seeking employment advantage, but evolved beyond that motivation. Now gainfully employed for years, he pursues a different dream: “I have this dream of being a teacher. What if I could just teach for a living? I’m trying to use the attention from these posts to make steps toward that.”

The Authentic Voice Imperative

Jeff Atwood champions blogging as a bulwark against the fragmentation of modern communication. “We’ve given everyone a Gutenberg printing press that reaches every other human on the planet. Blogs provide structure that chat destroys. Chat breaks everything into a million pieces—how do you create a narrative from that?” He advocates for blogging specifically because it demands coherence: “Tell the story of what happened to you. It’s your story—what’s unique about you.”

antirez, creator of Redis, offers a more minimalist perspective: “I don’t know exactly why I started, but I want to express my interest in things I like, my passions. It wasn’t some calculation about career benefits. I just needed to do it.”

fasterthanlime, blogging for approximately fifteen years, notes how cultural attitudes toward personal websites have cycled. “It wasn’t weird for people to have their own website—it was part of maintaining your online identity. We’re seeing that come back in the post-Twitter era.” He elevated his commitment in 2019 by launching a Patreon, transforming some articles into “mini-books” demanding solid hours to complete.

The Teaching Impulse and Community Building

Glauber Costa initially resisted blogging at ScyllaDB but discovered unexpected satisfaction: “I’ve always liked teaching people, and technical blogging was a way to do that at scale. It really does reach a lot of people, and it’s rewarding when your blog gets people to think differently or do something differently.”

Gunnar Morling emphasizes the bidirectional learning: “Often folks will add their own thoughts in comments from which I learn something new—so it’s a win for everyone.” Beyond personal posts, his blog announces project releases (like kcctl, a Kafka Connect command-line client) and coding challenges, building community while sharing knowledge.

The Enduring Commitment

What emerges from these fourteen perspectives is that blogging persists because it satisfies multiple human needs simultaneously: professional advancement, intellectual growth, teaching passion, and genuine creative expression. Whether motivated by career visibility, knowledge preservation, personal evolution, or authentic voice, these tech industry veterans demonstrate that the discipline of writing clarifies thinking while building lasting public artifacts.

As these bloggers collectively demonstrate, the question isn’t really “Why write?” but rather “Why wouldn’t you?”—given that blogging uniquely combines learning, teaching, building, and connecting in a single, portable, permanent medium.