Back in 2010, I started a blog without any real plan. Fifteen years later, I’ve picked it up again, and looking back at the archive, there’s a lot to unpack about what actually works and what doesn’t.

You Don’t Need Consistency to Build an Audience

There’s an 8-year gap between 2013 and 2021 where I barely posted anything. Yet when I came back, people were still reading. The blog didn’t collapse. My audience didn’t vanish. This surprised me.

What I learned: People care about the quality of what you write, not the frequency. A well-researched post every few months beats mediocre content every week. And if you take a break? Your audience will forgive you if the content is worth coming back for.

The corollary: don’t use “I need to post consistently” as an excuse to avoid blogging. Blog when you have something worth saying. Your readers will know the difference.

Bilingual Content Is Worth It (For the Right Reasons)

Everything I’ve published since 2010 exists in both English and French. Double the work. But here’s why I kept doing it: it’s not about maximizing ad impressions or pageviews. It’s about community.

By writing in French, I connected with developers in Quebec and French-speaking regions who would have otherwise been excluded. It created relationships with other developers and a sense of actually serving a community beyond the English-speaking tech bubble.

Is it worth the extra effort? Yes, but only if you’re doing it for the right reason, because you want those communities to have access to your knowledge, not because you’re chasing metrics. And nowadays, AI translation tools make it much easier. I write in one language and use AI to help with the translation, which saves time while still maintaining quality. It’s opened up bilingual content as an option even for those without the time to manually translate everything.

Technology Changes. Your Blog Is a Record of That

I’ve written about tools that no longer exist. BlogEngine.NET? Obsolete. Windows Phone 7? Dead. SharePoint 2010-2013? Mostly irrelevant today. .NET Micro Framework and Gadgeteer? Specialty hardware with limited adoption.

And yet, those posts served a purpose. They documented what I was learning at the time.

The insight here isn’t “pick evergreen topics.” It’s that your blog naturally documents your growth as a developer. The technologies change. Your approach, your problem-solving style, your architectural thinking, that evolves. Looking back at posts from 2010, I can see how my understanding has changed.

Don’t try to make all your posts timeless. Some will be. Some will be historical artifacts. Both are fine.

Deep Dives Get Bookmarked. Quick Tips Get Forgotten

Compare a quick tip post with a comprehensive guide. The quick tip gets a few likes and then disappears from memory. The guide, the one where you work through a real problem, show the approach, explain the trade-offs, and provide working code, that one gets shared. That one appears in search results years later.

My recent posts on Blazor + Supabase and building AI agents with Ollama and .NET were multi-part series. They took time. But they’re also what people reference and build on. The single-post quick-hits? Those were fun to write but didn’t create lasting value.

If you’re going to invest the time to write, invest it in something that will matter. Take a real problem you’ve solved and walk someone through it completely. That’s what people actually use.

Your Blog Is a Side Effect of Participating in Community

Building tools and releasing them (Stream Deck plugin, LeMot-Solveur solver) connected me with other developers more directly than the blog itself. Being a Microsoft MVP from 2008 to 2012 wasn’t because I had the “right” blog posts, it was because I participated in the community across multiple channels.

The takeaway: your blog isn’t your entire presence. It’s part of a larger involvement. Engage with other developers. Share code. Answer questions. Build things. The blog is one channel among many, but it amplifies the presence you’re already building elsewhere.

Some Posts Last. Most Don’t. That’s Expected

Posts about fundamental concepts (async/await, architecture patterns, solid design principles) still get traffic from 2010-2012. Posts about version releases or conference announcements? Those are done in a week.

I don’t write evergreen posts on purpose. Instead, I accept that the mix is natural. Some work you do will have legs. Some will be useful in the moment. Both matter. A post that solves someone’s immediate problem has value even if it’s forgotten in six months.

Don’t let concerns about “timelessness” paralyze you. Write what you’re learning now. Some of it will stick around. Some won’t. Both are fine.

Write About What You Actually Did, Not What You Think You Should Write About

The posts that people use are the ones where I walked through a real problem I solved. A working code example. The mistakes I made. The approach I took.

Contrast that with posts that are more “here’s a feature that exists”, those get minimal engagement. People don’t care about announcements. They care about solutions.

Write about the 3 AM debugging session you had. Write about the architecture decision you second-guessed. Write about the integration that took longer than expected. That’s what people actually want to read and can actually use.

The Platform Doesn’t Matter Much

I’ve used BlogEngine.NET, migrated to different platforms, eventually settled on Hugo. The actual format and tooling matter far less than people think.

What matters:

• Can people find your posts in search?
• Are they readable?
• Can you actually publish new ones without friction?

Don’t spend six months building the “perfect” blog platform and never write anything. Use whatever lets you write easily. Medium, Hugo, Markdown files, a CMS, it doesn’t matter. The content matters.

You Don’t Need Millions of Readers

My blog has never been a major source of traffic or revenue. My audience is small and focused, developers in my niche who find value in deep technical work.

And that’s been enough. It’s led to job opportunities, speaking invitations, professional relationships, and recognition in my community. A hundred people who actively value your work beats a thousand passive readers who skim.

Stop worrying about scale. Build something genuinely useful for your community, and the right people will find it.

Start Before You’re Ready

Looking back, my early posts from 2010 are rough. The writing wasn’t refined. I didn’t have a grand strategy. I just started.

But you know what? They served their purpose. They documented what I was learning. Some of them still get traffic. The imperfect post you publish today beats the perfect post you never write.

If you’re thinking about blogging, don’t wait until you have it all figured out. Start messy. You can improve as you go.

That’s what 15 years of blogging have taught me. The blog won’t make you rich. It won’t always get read. But if you write about what matters to you, and you take it seriously, the people who need that knowledge will find it.

Your writing compounds. A post about a problem you solved might help someone solve the same problem next year, or five years from now. You don’t get immediate feedback on that. But it happens.

If you have knowledge worth sharing, share it. Whether it’s on a blog, in a tutorial, in a GitHub repo with good documentation, get it out there. The world has enough people staying silent about what they know.