Four bloggers share insights and tips

I’m a Melbourne based software engineer, dog lover, movie watcher, and book reader with a love for writing and sharing ideas.

Blog: https://tim.macdonald.au

A space to share ideas surrounding the practice of developing web applications with the Laravel framework.

I’m a web developer and the founder of Larabelles, a community for PHP and Laravel developers underrepresented due to their gender. I’m also a book worm, a forever student, and an adventure seeker, I wear many hats and have even more interests.

Blog: www.zuzana-k.com/articles

A collection of my thoughts on anything that interests me.

Will Dobud is a senior lecturer of social work at Charles Sturt University. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including Kids These Days: Understanding and Supporting Youth Mental Health (September 2025).

Blog: https://www.outdoortherapycentre.com/on-track-blog

The Outdoor Therapy Centre’s On Track blog invites academics, students, and practitioners to contribute their work and passion for outdoor therapies from a range of perspectives.

Writer, researcher, knowledge translator, project and people manager, artist. Psychology, mental health & trauma expert. Podcast creator & host: Psych Attack, My Mate In. Loves: Food, dogs, travel. She/Her.

Blog: https://jasminebmacdonald.com.au/posts

A place to share interesting information about books, food, painting, psychology and research.

Tim

My blog mostly contains technical articles sharing novel ideas, thoughts, and practice tips I’ve cooked up while developing web applications. My posts range from long-winded deep dives and explorations of the tools we utilise while building web applications through to much shorter to-the-point practical tips, which are often coupled with a brief code example.

I mostly write practical posts where the reader leaves with a few new ideas they can immediately put into practice. I find these posts to be core to my blog. That being said, I do _occasionally_ indulge myself and write theoretical, sometimes esoteric, posts, but I try to keep them to a minimum.

Zuzana

Anything and everything that interests me. It might be a book I read that have thoughts about, a person I found out about and find inspiring, or a topic I want to learn more about. Writing helps me sort out my thoughts and understand the world around me better.

Will

Our blog covers a range of topics from recent research, practice examples, and reflections on practice. I’m particularly excited when social work students contribute their experiences of completing field placements as part of their social work degrees.

Jaz

I write about:

• my own research practices and findings
• being a writer and creative
• psychological research I have been reading or discussed on ‘Psych Attack’ podcast
• books I enjoyed
• places I have travelled to
• great places to eat from my podcast ‘My mate in…’.

Tim

I initially started writing posts to share ideas with my community. It gave me an outlet to share ideas that didn’t translate easily to a short social media post.

After writing more and more posts, I have also found a love for writing, a skill I never knew I would enjoy iterating on until I had a blog. I am not a great writer, so my blog gives me an outlet to continue sharpening my skills in the area.

I have also found writing posts a way for me to clarify and solidify my ideas, to take something swirling around in my head and transform it into a, hopefully, articulate idea that others can understand. I strongly believe that _writing is thinking_.

Lastly, I believe in an open web and the thought of posting my content and posting it to live in a _walled garden_ (siloed social media platform) hurts my heart. Having it on my blog ensures the content is not tied to any specific platform and embraces the idea of the open web.

Zuzana

I think it’s good to have an online presence, especially if you work is online. It helps to differentiate you from other people, and allow other people to get to know you. People hire people like themselves, so by having an online presence and sharing just enough of yourself to be approachable often leads to new connections, professional and personal, and new career opportunities.

Will

My friend Leiv who was a mentor for me in Norway, who sadly passed away a few years ago, told me his motto was “Share everything” …like Google. That stuck with me. I built the Outdoor Therapy Centre website to do just that. In the therapy space, people often try to market their knowledge into packageable courses or training materials that they sell to colleagues. I remember being young, entering the world of outdoor therapy and wanting access to more and more information and access to “experts” in the field. I would say that is the mission of our website and blog.

Jaz

When I started out, I wanted to share insights about doing research and findings from my own work that didn’t really fit into journal articles.

Subject matter expertise is often accompanied by a type of amnesia that makes you think everyone else knows the stuff you know. But in reality, you gradually level up by gathering ideas, experience, and opinions. I wanted to reflect on the skills and knowledge I have developed and created.

Over time, I realised my blog is anything I want it to be. I write about the things I have been thinking a lot about and want to understand better.

As I have progressed in my career, I do less of the ‘on the tools’ research tasks, and focus more on project and people management. My blog has filled the gaping hole in my chest from not having quiet focused time during the day to read and write.

Tim

1. Write.
2. Write more.
3. Don’t get caught up in starting your blog before you have written anything. Write something and then find a way to get your blog started. Use it as motivation, rather than the other way around.
4. Don’t feel guilty if you haven’t written a post in a while. It’ll always be there when inspiration strikes; Quality over quantity.
5. Enjoy it. Make the process something you do for yourself, not others.

Zuzana

1. You might have technical knowledge to build your own blog, but when it comes to starting it, take the path of least resistance. Don’t get bogged down by the perfect design and functionality, you can (and will) change it as the time goes. Set up fast, set up easy, and get started writing.
2. Your blogs don’t need to be a certain length nor do they need to be unique or valuable to anyone but you. You can write short blogs, long blogs, and anything in between. Sometimes a quote and a few thoughts is enough. You can write about anything you find interesting, and it doesn’t need to be groundbreaking. Don’t put any pressure on yourself.
3. Share it with people. Don’t overthink it. You will probably never think the blog is finished or great, but share it with people anyway. Everything is a work in progress, work that is never done.

Will

1. Write. Write. And Write.
2. Also, I like to think about writing from the lens of playing music. I try to consistently consider how my reader may interpret what I’m writing. What information is important to people entering the outdoor therapy field?
3. I try to avoid what I’ve learned to call “true but useless” information, things that may be somewhat interesting but do not ultimately inspire increase connection and passion. So I like to think about interested ideas that may encourage people to think a bit differently about their own journey.  

Jaz

1. Keep it simple to start with. Do a minimum viable product version. Get some posts out that are basic and you are happy with. My experience is that people try to do all the things from the start and they don’t end up doing the part they wanted to do, sharing cool content. 
2. Create content because you can and want to. Don’t think about what you should do, think about what will bring you joy. 
3. Create visual interest using free images or your own photos. Consider how you can reduce image file size so your site isn’t slow. Later on you might consider getting a subscription for an image databases like Unsplash. 
4. Build your connections and content by reaching out to other people and inviting them to help you make interesting things. This helps you share your expertise and learn from others. Asking people to join you in a project usually leads to more requests to join the cool projects other people are making.
5. Don’t chase an audience. If you make something you would want to read, your people will find you.

Tim

Being a software developer, I decided to build my own blog platform. This means I get really deep control of everything, but that also means I have to deal with things breaking. Sometimes I have a post ready and realise I need to fix other things before I can get it out. That is not always “fun”.

Zuzana

Updating my bio or about page. Ideally, this page should be up to date but I tend to forget to even look at it and add the most up to date information, including the latest conference talks I’d done, or podcasts I had recorded.

Will

Getting the energy and motivation to pursue a topic and get it written in the hardest part. I try to stay up to date with alerts on my phone for new articles or pieces of research relevant to our work. As I learn new things, I find out a new angle to continue writing about outdoor therapy to bring in a fresh perspective.

While editing can be tenuous, I purchased Speechify so I can listen to my writing being read back to me in different voices. Whether it’s Obama, Snoop Dogg, or many of the other voices and accents, listening to my writing helps to interpret what I’ve written through the reader’s lens. This is a helpful tool to make the editing process much more enjoyable.

Jaz

• Having the deep desire to write but being tired from work or needing to prioritise life admin.
• When you are working on a post and it switches from being enjoyable and a flow process, to something a little more obsessive.
• Growing a backlog list of post ideas that you’re never going to actually write. Not deleting said backlog list. Feeling guilty when you see it while you’re out flirting with that hot new idea.

Tim

I have found my online community on social media and will share links to my posts there. I’ll happily reach out via direct message to people I feel may be interested in a specific post and share it with them.

My site also supports an RSS feed, which allows people to subscribe to my new posts, kind of like an email subscription.

I try not to worry too much about distribution because I’m always writing for myself and the love of writing, so sharing it or having others read, comment, or share my posts is not the why I do it, although I do love when any of that happens.

Zuzana

I overthink it every single time, I doubt if my content is any good, if I said anything wrong, how it’s going to be received, but I realised that if I publish my blog and post about it on social media the last thing I do before going to bed, I bypass the compulsion to check my notifications and what people think or say about my content for at least 8 hours. This often puts enough distance between my content and I and by the morning, I don’t worry about it as much.

Will

Sharing the blogs on social media add an additional wrinkle. Some posts get a lot of likes and interaction, others do not. I try not to worry about this as I aim to just feel stoked that I get to write about interesting topics and engage with amazing people. The journey, not the destination.

Jaz

Creating content and promoting content are two different beasts. Especially promoting on socials. I love writing. I often dread sharing the content. You can also end up spending more time lurking online – waiting for positive responses and fearing abusive ones – than actually writing.

I used to maintain several fulfilling socials accounts. But in recent years I am seeing less meaningful social interaction on platforms, coupled with more and more advertising. So now I only post on LinkedIn.

Each time I make something I personally reach out to folks I think will appreciate it. I’m seeking meaningful and reciprocal connections with interesting and kind people.