Medium, Dev.to, Hashnode, Wordpress? Or, why should you invest in yourself rather than in platforms?
The Problem
Developers should write and write often. It may be anything - code snippets, ideas, thoughts, design principles, standards and what not. I have found that writing down things often forces me to solidify abstractions and get more clarity.
But, where to write?
The Options
Wordpress is the past. Though I continue to host a few of my blogs - it is just laziness preventing me from migrating over to better things. Wordpress is often slow, theme design is frustrating (if you are not in WP/PHP world that is), and in general does not carry itself quite well nowadays.
Medium is pay-walled in a annoying way, and annoys you more with popups and what not. And, it is not a pleasant thing to port stuff.
Dev.to / Hash.node are better. You can write stuff and copy over/export markdown. You should be easily able to port it elsewhere if it comes to it.
So, what should you choose?
The Answer
None.
This is 2020, and you should not be debating on which platform to write on.
- Just choose a static site generator - Hugo, Jekyll, or 11ty.
- Host your content on Github, Netlify, Gitlab, or Amazon S3
- Publish same content/summary on dev.to or other platforms if you are looking forward to involve that community in your discussions
Want more? See -
- Pick one of the Hugo themes and get started on the fastest static site generator in seconds
- Start with Jekyll using a theme - https://techformist.com/create-beautiful-performant-sites-free-ebook/
- Start with 11ty using one of the starter projects
Why do this?
Well.. you own your content and your destiny. It is much,much easier to control all parts of your story and depend on third parties for a larger exposure - only when required.
Platforms can be transient. Your stories should not be. There should be one place to record your thoughts through years, and what better way than putting all your content in one place. It is really easy to play around with all that data 5-6 years down the line rather than extracting data from a third-party site in some obscure format.
