Introduction

You may not know it yet, but blogging has the potential to change your life.

I didn’t know it either when I first began writing online, well over a decade ago. I thought blogging would be a way to perform a brain dump from time to time. Maybe something would come out of it, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

Boy, was I wrong.

Every day we face many decisions. Most of them turn out to be inconsequential, but occasionally a choice ends up shaping our future. Starting to blog did just that for me.

In fact, I count blogging as one of three decisions that drastically affected my career and personal life: the other two being leaving Italy—my home country—in 2003 and getting into the Ruby programming language before Rails was released to the world.

You might think I’m overstating the impact blogging has had on me. Allow me to briefly recap some highlights that might convince you otherwise.

• My manager found me through a post on my programming blog. I moved to Canada, my wife’s native country, as a result and I’ve been employed by IBM for over twelve years now.

• Blogging has afforded me extra income, every single month, for more than a decade.

• I’ve received dozens of technical books and other freebies over the years.

• When we lost our home and virtually everything we owned to an arson fire in October 2016, a crowdfunding campaign was set up on our behalf. Simply posting it on my blog (and also on my wife’s blog) led to a staggering 297 donations.^[1] Family, close friends, and colleagues all generously helped and we were very appreciative. What surprised us was that the majority of donors were blog readers and friends we’d made through blogging. My wife received numerous care packages as well. What a great help to receive such an outpouring of support during a time of complete loss.

• Last year I sold one of my blogs about mathematics to a British company and used the profits for the down payment on a new house.

The positive impact that blogging has had on my career, income, and life in general is what persuaded me to write this book. I’m certain that by the end of it, you’ll have the skills required to benefit from sharing your knowledge online.

This book teaches you the art and science of technical blogging and shows you how to be a successful blogger. Whenever possible, I’ve tried to back up my assertions with direct experiences and statistics.

Nevertheless, this is an opinionated book. It’s the distilled form of what I’ve learned from trial and error over the course of the past fourteen years through several blogs that I started, either in English or Italian. As you read it, you may disagree with me, much like the readers of my blogs sometimes contest a point I’ve made in one of my posts.

That’s OK.

My goal is to provide you with a roadmap to achieve success with your own blog. I’ll supply you with step-by-step instructions, starting with the planning phase and going all the way to creating, promoting, benefiting from, and maintaining your blog. I won’t shy away from expressing my opinion about what you should do and what is best avoided.

But you’re not me, and this is a team effort. So I also want to get you thinking in new ways, experimenting, and ultimately reaching your own conclusions about what does and doesn’t work for your technical blog. I’ll be your mentor, gently guiding you in the right direction while still allowing you to find your own way.