How Often Should I Post, and How Do I Choose Topics?

Someone sent me a message asking how often I post and how I decide what to write about. I started typing a reply, realized the reply was three paragraphs long, and realized that was the second most useful thing that had happened to me all week, the first being that they asked at all. So let me answer both halves properly. We'll do topics first, because it's the part people actually get stuck on, and it's the part with the good news. "I don't know what to write about" You do. You just think your ideas have to arrive dressed up and important, delivered by a choir, on a subject nobody has ever covered. They don't, and it hasn't. Here's the thing I wish someone had told me earlier: you shouldn't look far. The temptation is to hunt for some grand, novel, definitive topic, the article that will Establish You. Meanwhile the good material is sitting on your desk, in your last three WhatsApp messages, a sermon at church, and in your browser history. Stop scanning the horizon. Look at your feet. Most of what I write comes from five very ordinary places. What you already know. Your areas of expertise. The stuff so obvious to you that you assume everyone knows it- that's the stuff. The curse of knowledge means the thing you find boringly basic is exactly the thing someone two steps behind you is desperate to read. You are not writing for the experts above you. You're writing for last-year's-you. What you find fascinating. If a thing grabbed you, a weird bug, a clever pattern, a stat that flipped your intuition, that fascination is transferable. Genuine interest is loud on the page and impossible to fake. Write the thing you'd corner a friend at a party to talk about. What you're currently learning. This one feels wrong, so let me defend it: you do not have to be an authority to write. Learning in public is a real genre, and often a better read than the expert's version, because you still remember what confused you. The expert forgot. You're standing in the exact spot your reader is standing in right now; use it before you climb out of it. Problems you faced, and how you got out. This is the richest vein you have. Every bug that ate your afternoon, every config that made no sense, every "why is this not working" that ended in an "OHHH" - that's a tutorial with a beginning, a middle, and a genuinely earned ending. Someone is Googling that exact error message tonight. Be the post they're relieved to find. Bonus: the fresher the pain, the better the write-up, because you still have the failed attempts in your head. Questions people ask you. If one person asked, more people wondered and didn't. A question is a pre-validated demand; someone has literally told you they want this. This whole article is that. Somebody asked me a question, I answered it in a DM, and then I let the answer grow up into a post. Your DMs, your code reviews, the same thing three juniors asked this month- that's a content calendar hiding in plain sight. Notice what all five have in common: none of them require you to leave your own life. Expertise, curiosity, learning, problems, questions. You generate all of these just by working. The topics aren't the scarce resource. Noticing them is. So start keeping a list. When someone asks you something, when you fix something annoying, when you learn something that made you go "huh", jot it down before it evaporates. Future-you will never be short of material again. Okay, now - how often? Here's where I'll be honest instead of impressive, because the honest answer is less fun than "post every single day and win." Consistency beats volume. One post a month that actually shows up, forever, will do more for you than a heroic two-week sprint of daily posting that burns you out and ends in six months of silence. The person who posts steadily gets found, gets remembered, and gets better, because writing is a skill and skills need reps, not sprints. So don't ask "what's the maximum I can produce?" Ask "what rhythm can I keep even in a busy week?" Then commit to that, not to the fantasy version of you who has infinite evenings. If that's weekly, great. If it's every other week, also great. Pick the pace you won't come to resent. Two guardrails around that: Don't force a post when you have nothing to say. A phoned-in article to hit a quota reads exactly like what it is, and it teaches your readers to skim you. Silence is better than filler. But also don't wait for perfect. "I have nothing to say" and "I don't think this is good enough yet" are different problems. The first is real. The second is usually just fear wearing a productive-looking costume. Ship the B+ post. The A+ one only exists because you shipped the B+ ones first. The rhythm matters more than the number on it. Frequency is a promise you make to people who read you, and like any promise, a modest one you keep beats a grand one you break. The whole thing in one breath Write from your own life, what you know, what grabs you, what you're learning, what broke, what people ask. Keep a running list so you're never staring at a blank page. And post at a pace you can actually sustain, because the writer who's still here in two years wins by default. The best proof I can offer is this post. It started as a question in my inbox. That's the entire trick: you're already surrounded by the answers; you just have to start writing them down.