Hashnode: A Blogging Platform for Developers
Hashnode is a free developer blogging platform. Say you’ve just finished an ambitious project and want to write about 10 important lessons you’ve learned as a developer during it. You should definitely blog it—I love that kind of blog post, myself. Making a jump into the technical debt of operating your own blog isn’t a small choice, but it’s important to own your own content. With Hashnode, the decision gets a lot easier. You can blog under a site you entirely own, and at the same time, reap the benefits of hosted software tailor-made for developer blogging and be part of a social center around developer writing.
Here are some things, technologically, I see and like:
- Write in Markdown. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a developer who didn’t prefer writing in
Markdown. - Its not an “own your content” as in theoretically you could export content. Your content is in your GitHub repo. You wanna migrate it later? Go for it.
- Your site, whether at your own custom domain or at a free subdomain, is hosted, CDN-backed, and SSL secured, while being customizable to your own style.
- Developer specific features are there, like syntax highlighting for your code.
- You get to be part of on-site community as well as a behind-the-scenes Discord community.
- Your blog is highly optimized for performance, accessibility, and SEO. You’ll be hitting 100’s on Lighthouse reports, which is no small feat.
Your future biggest fans are there waiting for you ;).
The team over there isn’t oblivious to the other hosted blogging platforms out there. We’ve all seen programming blog posts on Medium, right? They tend to be one-offs in my experience. Hashnode is a Medium-alternative for developers. Medium just doesn’t cater particularly well to the developer audience. Plus you never know when your content will end up being behind a random paywall, a mega turn-off to fellow developers just trying to learn something. No ads or paywalls on Hashnode, ever.
The smart move, I’d say, is buying a domain name to represent yourself right away. I think that’s a super valuable stepping stone in all developer journeys. Then hook it up to Hashnode. Then wherever you do from that day forward, you are building domain equity there. You’re never going to regret that. That domain strength belongs entirely to you forever. Not to mention Medium wants $50/year to map a domain and DEV doesn’t let you do it at all.
But building your own site can be a lonely experience at first. The internet is a big place and you’ll be a small fish and first. By starting off at Hashnode, it’s like having a cheat code for being a much bigger fish right on day one.
DEV is out there too being a developer writing hub, but they don’t allow you to host your own site and build your own domain equity, as Hashnode does, or customize it to your liking as deeply.
Hashnode is built by developers, for developers, for real. Blogging for devs! The team there is very interested and receptive to your feature requests—so hit them up!
One more twist here that you might just love.
Hashnode Sponsors is a new way your fans can help monetize your blog directly, and Hashnode doesn’t take a cut of it at all.
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