Are Blogs Still Relevant? #tsql2sday

Jeff Iannucci asked, “Are blogs still relevant?”

As an author, yes, because:

• Blogs provide a written proof of what you were doing, at various points in time
• Blogs provide social proof that managers will see when they Google your name
• Blogs sharpen your technical skills – because nothing teaches you something better than having to teach it to someone else
• Blogs sharpen your communication skills – because AI writing is terrible, and everybody recognizes it from a mile away, and if you’re relying on that to save you, you’re going to be in for a rough decade

As a reader, yes, because:

• Blogs provide fast-breaking news of edge case issues
• Blogs provide answers to questions you wouldn’t have thought of asking
• Blogs provide personal opinions from experienced individuals

They’ve never been the only way for writers and readers to achieve these objectives. There have always been other ways to do it, like presenting, podcasting, streaming, social media, building scripts & tools, etc, and there will continue to be new ways in the future. Almost 20 years ago, I wrote that blogging isn’t the way to make money immediately or build up name recognition quickly. It’s never been. It’s a personal investment of your time in order to gain long-term career traction.

Followup Questions

“Are blogs less relevant for authors?” It can be frustrating in the sense that AI models are trained on your work, and you don’t get paid for that. Plagiarism has long been a problem in the blogging community. I’ve kinda made my peace with that – like I said earlier, tech writing as an income strategy hasn’t been a good idea for decades. However, if your goal is to help people, then blogs are more powerful than ever, because their advice spreads further & faster. If you’re doing this to help, they’re just as relevant as ever.

“Are blogs less relevant for readers?” Unquestionably yes, because people are getting advice directly in their IDEs and LLMs. There’s a good chunk of tech workers who simply don’t wanna learn, and just wanna hit Execute and have the thing work. I don’t blame them. Technology is awful. Those people are less likely than ever to visit blogs.

“Are blogs less relevant for hiring managers?” No, they’re more relevant than ever to help sift out the signal from the noise. They’re a clear, time-archived track record of things that someone knew – or, in the case of AI-written blog posts, something they’re bluffing about. An AI-written blog isn’t doing you favors in the year 2026, and yes, we know which blog posts are AI slop versus which ones you crafted by hand.

“Are there less blogs around now?” Yes, over the last several years, a lot of the Microsoft SQL Server community members have moved on to other technologies, had family changes, reprioritized their work/life balance, or just gotten burned out. There are way, way less bloggers and blog posts around here than there used to be. I partially blame myself, too, because I used to bang the “you-should-blog” drum a lot around here, and I haven’t been doing it over the last decade. I’m still banging out 3-4 blog posts per week, so I’m leading by example, but I should probably be advocating for others to write more.

Today, in particular, is an interesting day to discuss this because right now, as this goes live, Microsoft is delivering the keynote session at the PASS Data Community Summit in Seattle. I’m there in the audience, listening in. In the past, this is the kind of thing I would have liveblogged. The event used to have a blogger’s table where a couple dozen of us would have all been typing away, getting the news out to our readers. I realized while writing this post that conferences haven’t had bloggers’ tables since the pandemic, and it hasn’t even occurred to me to liveblog these events anymore. The big reason behind that isn’t that blogging isn’t relevant – it’s that the keynote speeches have mostly turned into marketing spam, trying to pass long-since-announced features off as “new”, because event keynote schedules just don’t line up well with software releases anymore. The world is moving faster – but that doesn’t make blogs less relevant, it makes them more relevant since it’s one of the places you can find hot takes on this new stuff, like my hot take on Microsoft Database Hub, which I’m sure they’re gonna try to pass off as “new” again in this keynote, if they’re not deprecating it already.