Do You Have the Credibility to Write?
Nobody starts with credibility.
It took me four years to learn this. There are people in our industry who don’t trust anyone with a large audience. To them, an audience itself is a red flag. I grew my social following over exactly those years, so that argument always landed close to home, and something about it felt wrong to me.
It stung. And it left me with the question that stops most people before their first post: who am I to write? Do I have the right, and the credibility, to do it?
I knew that question already. It was waiting for me on day one of publishing, when I already had twenty years in the industry, thirty-plus projects, and a PhD in computer science behind me. The doubt never checks your CV. It happens to everyone.
For a long time I had no answer. Now I do, after a few years in this space of “content creation,” and I want to give it to everyone who is starting today.
Take the skepticism. All of it.
The skeptics are right about one thing: follower counts prove nothing about expertise. A hundred thousand subscribers don’t make your arguments any stronger, so test every claim on its merits (mine included). Ask for sources. If someone hides behind jargon, keep asking until the real knowledge surfaces.
The same rule protects you
Look at what that rule does for a beginner. If reach cannot prove someone right, it cannot prove them wrong. It also cannot prove you unqualified. The argument is the only thing on trial, which means a junior engineer with a correct observation can reach a better conclusion than a famous name with a wrong one. For someone starting from zero, there has never been a better deal.
Credibility is an output, not an input
Credibility never arrives in advance, and nobody will hand it to you. You earn it in public, by being wrong in front of everyone and correcting yourself for years. Every writer you trust today started with zero readers and no permission from anyone.
So the question “do you have the credibility to write?” is backwards. Writing is how you get it. If you wait for someone to declare you credible, you will wait forever. This is something that took me a long time to conclude.
Critical thinking is not negative thinking
There is a lot of talk about critical thinking, and I find that our industry keeps getting it wrong. We train ourselves to find issues, in code review and in design discussions, and the habit serves us well at work. In public, it turned into something else. Tearing things down started to read as intelligence, and encouraging people as naivety.
No takedown ever taught anyone a skill. Every tutorial and postmortem you found online exists because someone gave their knowledge away and accepted the risk of being criticized for it. Each person who publishes lowers the wall for the one who comes after.
Write anyway
If you have ten years of lessons and zero followers, start. Your first posts will be rough (mine were). Sooner or later someone will ask who you are to say any of this, and the honest answer is: nobody yet. Answer with the next post, answer with quality writing.
One condition, and it holds at every level of seniority: write from what you have lived. Your first production incident is worth more to a reader than an opinion on architecture you have never run. Experience is the one raw material nobody can copy from you.
But don’t stay silent just because you learned something only yesterday. If you found it interesting, plenty of people out there would like to learn it too. Be their curator.
I kept publishing, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions of my career. The industry has enough critics.
Be one of the teachers.