11 The “Lessons Learned” pattern

This chapter covers

  • Blog posts that share lessons learned from technical challenges
  • Their purpose and audience
  • How various authors approached this type of post
  • Key elements of successful “Lessons Learned” posts
  • Dos and don’ts for your own “Lessons Learned” post

Attention, aspiring technical influencers: this is the chapter for you! The “Lessons Learned” pattern is all about sharing your personal experiences and process of drawing conclusions from your trials and errors. It is the perfect starter engineering blog post because the only real requirement is having encountered a technical problem of any sort.

Technical audiences love to learn. And one of the few things they love even more than learning itself is learning from other people’s mistakes instead of their own. “Lessons Learned” posts often contain condensed knowledge about how somebody else dealt with a problem. This is something many readers hold dear because it’s a lightweight version of having a mentor who can walk you through a problem.

Start with a humble “Lessons Learned” post, and you’ll be serially applying the “Thoughts on Trends” pattern (chapter 12) like a professional industry luminary in no time! (Conditions apply: “no time” is a euphemism for “sometimes a considerable amount of time, if ever.”)

11.1 Purpose

11.1.1 Self-reflection

11.1.2 Storytelling

11.1.3 Kickstart

11.2 Audience

11.3 Examples of “Lessons Learned” blog posts

11.3.1 25% or 6 to 4: The 11/6/23 Authentication Outage

11.3.2 Herding Elephants: Lessons Learned from Sharding Postgres at Notion

11.3.3 Something You Probably Want to Know About if You’re Using SQLite in Golang

11.3.4 Lessons Learned Scaling PostgreSQL Database to 1.2bn Records/Month

11.3.5 Lessons from Stripe

11.4 Characteristics

11.4.1 Diary-like

11.4.2 Imprintable

11.4.3 Reflections and ruminations

Summary