How I decide what’s worth turning into a blog post

Why some moments become blog posts and others disappear

I write a lot, but I do not publish a lot.

That difference matters.

If I turned every bug, feature request, and awkward meeting into a post, my blog would read like a raw work log. Accurate, but lifeless. What actually ends up published is heavily filtered. Not by popularity. Not by how impressive it sounds. By something more personal.

A moment has to stay with me.

Most work problems die the moment I close my laptop. They are solved, archived, forgotten. But some linger. I replay them in my head while doing other stuff. I explain them to my talking stages who do not even care about software. I catch myself rewriting the story before it is even written. That is usually the first sign that I am not done with it yet.

And if I am not done with it, it might be a blog post.

I write about moments that bruised my ego a little

The clean victories are boring.

What interests me are the moments where I was confident and wrong. The bug I dismissed as impossible. The user and QA request I thought made sense. The design I defended until reality disagreed. Those situations leave a mark. A small bruise on the ego that forces reflection.

That bruise is where the story lives.

When I write, I am not just documenting the solution. I am documenting the version of me that existed before the solution. The assumptions. The shortcuts. The blind spots. Readers are not only learning how the system works. They are watching a mindset adjust in real time.

That is more honest than pretending I saw the answer from the start.

I ask a simple question: would past me have searched for this at midnight

This is my strongest filter.

I picture an older version of myself stuck on the same problem. It is late. Stack Overflow tabs are multiplying and chaotic conversations with ChatGpt. Every answer is close, but not quite right. Would my post have helped him breathe easier? Would it have made him feel less alone in the confusion?

If yes, I write it.

I am not chasing authority. I am writing survival notes for the engineer I used to be. That keeps the tone grounded. I explain the obvious parts. I include the failed attempts. I admit where I guessed. The mess is part of the value. Clean tutorials are everywhere. Honest journeys are rarer.

Not every solution is a story

Some fixes are just fixes.

They work, they are correct, and they do not carry any emotional weight. There is nothing wrong with that. But a blog post needs tension. A wrong turn. A moment of doubt. A decision that could have gone either way. Without that, it reads like documentation, not a narrative.

I look for a turning point.

The second where I realized the problem was not what I thought. The comment from a teammate that reframed everything. The line in the docs I somehow skipped three times. If I can point to that pivot, I know I have a story, not just an answer.

The posts that scare me a little are usually the right ones

The best topics come with hesitation.

I worry they make me look inexperienced. I worry the mistake is too obvious. I worry someone senior will read it and shake their head. That discomfort is a signal. It means I am close to something real. Something that required growth.

When I only write about polished wins, the blog becomes a highlight reel. It stops being useful. Growth is messy. Debugging is messy. Learning is messy. If I edit out the mess, I am lying by omission.

So I leave it in.

The filter is emotional before it is technical

At the surface, my blog looks technical. Bugs, systems, features, edge cases. Underneath, it is a record of reactions. Frustration. relief. embarrassment. curiosity. Quiet pride when something finally clicks.

I publish the moments that carry emotion because emotion is what makes them memorable. The technical details matter, but they are not the whole story. The human part is what turns a fix into a narrative someone actually wants to read.

In the end, deciding what is worth a post is not about scale. It is about impact. Not on the company. Not on the product. On me.

If a moment changed how I think, humbled me, or taught me something I wish I had known earlier, it earns a place on the blog.

Everything else can disappear.

And most of it should.

Happy Blogging!