The invitation
For this T-SQL Tuesday, I’m asking folks to share why they do or don’t think the blog platform is still relevant for those of us working with databases.
Way back in the yester-year of 1999, I made an accidental switch from a fledgling airline pilot to a programmer. My background was in aviation. My education was in aviation. But I had always been a geek at heart.
Back in the '80s, I taught myself how to program in BASIC on a Commodore 64 using one of the most important blogs of the day, Family Computing Magazine. And even though I was flying airplanes, I kept reading geeky magazines and reading posts on various CompuServe forums.
And then, right before I became a professional geek, I discovered the thing called the Internet. It was so cool. You could put up all sorts of documents about all sorts of different things. But, alas, to actually learn most of the things I needed to learn through my conversion to fledgling geek, I had to peruse those very heavy blogs called Manuals.
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| Credit: WebDesignMuseum.org |
Even in those early days, there was a lot of plain bad information out there. A personal page of someone you trusted gave you a reference where you could be sure you'd find legit information.
I didn't realize at the time that I had watched "blogs" being born.
TIME PASSES...
I'm a self-taught guy. I didn't go to school to be a programmer or to learn how to work with databases. I've had little formal training in the tech realm. Most everything I know, I've learned myself, mostly through reading the work that other people have written, trying to do it myself, then going back to try to find out how I can do the things I needed to do even better. And occasionally falling down enough rabbit holes that I learned way more things than I ever thought I wanted to know about.
I can honestly say that without blogs, I probably wouldn't be where I am today.
Way back in 2015, a friend of mine put out a call to arms to get people to write more. I did my best to answer that call, and jabberings.codefumonkey.com was born with grand plans. Unfortunately, those plans didn't exactly come to as much fruition as I wanted. My first post there was about how I wanted to write more: at least once a week. I mostly did it my first year, but then fell off. A lot.
One of the best ways to get into writing is to write about the problems you solved at work. I don't want to make excuses, but I have spent the vast majority of my career working under strict NDAs, data protection laws or in government secure environments. There wasn't a lot I was allowed to say about what I was working on. So I was a much bigger consumer than a contributor. Still though, blogs have been a massive part of my career.
Moving into modern times, the question was, "Are blogs still relevant?".
I think the answer is a resounding "Yes". But the way they are being consumed (at least by me) has changed tremendously.
I still am a regular reader of Brent Ozar's blog, primarily because I subscribe to his website and am reminded when he posts. Makes it easy. And I'll branch off from some of the links he posts to read other things that grab my attention.
But the vast majority of my data consumption comes through Googling or ChatGPTing a problem I have and then sometimes following the links that are referenced in the answers.
And this is where I think good blogs are probably more important than ever. You probably won't get as many direct subscribers to your blog as you used to. It's just too easy to ask whatever flavor of LLM you prefer to help you with your issue. But it's those good blogs that allow those LLMs to give you the good answers. Otherwise, if the LLMs never get new content to learn from, you just keep getting the same stagnant slop.
I think that makes it much more difficult, if not nearly impossible, to truly monetize your blog in such a way that allows you to quit your day job. But I think if that's what you were doing it for, you were probably doing it wrong.
I still think good content creators deserve some sort of compensation for the knowledge they share, but I'm not sure what that looks like in our current environment. I know it's not much, but I will happily do my part and buy a round of beer (or ++) if I am in the company of one of the bloggers who have helped me get my job done. Even if that answer was originally sourced from ChatGPT.
One of the values that was instilled into me way back during my days of flight instructing is that I want to share the things I've learned so that the people who come after me can learn from the things I did wrong, rather than have to make the same mistakes themselves.
I'm glad there are people out there who enjoy writing. Who enjoy sharing the information they've learned. Who put in the effort to make regular content. I unfortunately found out that I only meet two of those things, but the people who do all three are the ones who make my job and my life so much easier.
Thank you.
I'm a self-taught guy. I didn't go to school to be a programmer or to learn how to work with databases. I've had little formal training in the tech realm. Most everything I know, I've learned myself, mostly through reading the work that other people have written, trying to do it myself, then going back to try to find out how I can do the things I needed to do even better. And occasionally falling down enough rabbit holes that I learned way more things than I ever thought I wanted to know about.
I can honestly say that without blogs, I probably wouldn't be where I am today.
Way back in 2015, a friend of mine put out a call to arms to get people to write more. I did my best to answer that call, and jabberings.codefumonkey.com was born with grand plans. Unfortunately, those plans didn't exactly come to as much fruition as I wanted. My first post there was about how I wanted to write more: at least once a week. I mostly did it my first year, but then fell off. A lot.
One of the best ways to get into writing is to write about the problems you solved at work. I don't want to make excuses, but I have spent the vast majority of my career working under strict NDAs, data protection laws or in government secure environments. There wasn't a lot I was allowed to say about what I was working on. So I was a much bigger consumer than a contributor. Still though, blogs have been a massive part of my career.
Moving into modern times, the question was, "Are blogs still relevant?".
I think the answer is a resounding "Yes". But the way they are being consumed (at least by me) has changed tremendously.
I still am a regular reader of Brent Ozar's blog, primarily because I subscribe to his website and am reminded when he posts. Makes it easy. And I'll branch off from some of the links he posts to read other things that grab my attention.
But the vast majority of my data consumption comes through Googling or ChatGPTing a problem I have and then sometimes following the links that are referenced in the answers.
And this is where I think good blogs are probably more important than ever. You probably won't get as many direct subscribers to your blog as you used to. It's just too easy to ask whatever flavor of LLM you prefer to help you with your issue. But it's those good blogs that allow those LLMs to give you the good answers. Otherwise, if the LLMs never get new content to learn from, you just keep getting the same stagnant slop.
I think that makes it much more difficult, if not nearly impossible, to truly monetize your blog in such a way that allows you to quit your day job. But I think if that's what you were doing it for, you were probably doing it wrong.
I still think good content creators deserve some sort of compensation for the knowledge they share, but I'm not sure what that looks like in our current environment. I know it's not much, but I will happily do my part and buy a round of beer (or ++) if I am in the company of one of the bloggers who have helped me get my job done. Even if that answer was originally sourced from ChatGPT.
One of the values that was instilled into me way back during my days of flight instructing is that I want to share the things I've learned so that the people who come after me can learn from the things I did wrong, rather than have to make the same mistakes themselves.
I'm glad there are people out there who enjoy writing. Who enjoy sharing the information they've learned. Who put in the effort to make regular content. I unfortunately found out that I only meet two of those things, but the people who do all three are the ones who make my job and my life so much easier.
Thank you.
