Why Corporate Engineering Blogs Fail
Dan Luu recently published research on corporate engineering blogs, and the headline finding is sobering: his personal blog frequently outperforms the entire engineering blog of a company valued at nine to ten figures. Sometimes it's by an order of magnitude. That's despite those companies having hundreds or thousands of employees and, in theory, far more resources to produce compelling content.
The strange part is that a good engineering blog is arguably more valuable to a company than to an individual. It drives top-of-funnel traffic, helps with recruiting, and positions the company as an industry leader. Yet most companies fail to capitalize on this, even when they have the budget and headcount to do it well.
Luu didn't just speculate about why. He interviewed people at companies known for having genuinely good engineering blogs—Heap, Segment, and Cloudflare—and documented their internal workflows. In all three cases, the process starts the same way: someone has an idea for a post. That sounds trivial, but it suggests something important about the culture at those companies. Engineers want to write because it's encouraged and rewarded. Once that momentum builds, there's a positive feedback loop, and the main job of management is to keep blockers out of the way.
What Good Blogs Actually Look Like
Some companies treat their blog as a direct marketing channel, and that can work well when done transparently. CodePen recently started using Appcues, and the decision was influenced in part by the quality of Appcues' blog. Similarly, LogRocket, a product for tracking JavaScript errors, runs a blog that's essentially a general front-end publication. It covers everything CSS-Tricks would cover, with a product pitch appended to each post. LogRocket has been running this playbook for about three years, and it appears to be working extremely well.
The Disjointed Problem
Browser vendors are a notable exception to the general mediocrity, but they have their own issue: fragmentation. Mozilla's blogging presence is scattered across an official-looking blog, a "hacks" blog, a planet aggregator, a nightly blog, and a release notes feed. Google has the same problem. There's no obvious single hub for any of their engineering writing, which dilutes the impact of what are often strong individual posts.
Going Above and Beyond
Stripe has a strong engineering blog, but it goes further by publishing Increment, a polished magazine available both online and in print. That's a step beyond even the best corporate blogs, and it signals a level of commitment to engineering communication that few companies match.
