Tips for Writing a Technical Blog Post and Showing it Off

Why do developers write blogs? The biggest reason is to build relationships. Just as with open source projects, blog posts are another way to share knowledge and invite collaboration from others. Writing a blog post about your experiences is a valuable way to share your knowledge and build your network.

Here’s how you can do it.

Template It Out: Decide What Your Post Is

Start with a template to help define your intent in writing (adapted from emptysqua.re/blog post “Resources for Writing About Programming” by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis)

Disclaimer: Your blog post does not have to fit into any of these templates. These are just suggestions.

All of these have a clear opening, body, and closing. No matter how you choose to write your post, you should aim to structure your blog post in a similar fashion – your reader needs structure to follow your thoughts.

Story:

“I’m going to tell you a story about [blank], how it taught me [blank], and led to [blank]. First this happened, then that happened. And that’s the story of [blank].”

Examples:

  • I did this project and learned this thing. I found out this thing about myself.
  • I used this technology, and here’s what happened.
  • I utilized agile practices in this way, and here’s what happened. I learned this lesson.

Opinion:

Structure:

  1. Thesis
  2. Evidence to support Thesis
  3. Response to likely objections
  4. Restate Thesis

Focus on not only having an opinion but also crafting a compelling argument to support it.

Tip: Think about how your experience at Turing has shaped your opinion about how software is developed.

How-To:

How-Tos must be motivated by something. Begin by telling your reader when and why this how-to is important to know.

“Doing [blank] is important under the given conditions: [blank]. I’m going to show you how to [blank]. Do this, then do that. There, now I’ve shown you how to [blank]. You should go out and do [blank].”

Hint: Any time you solve a problem, write about how you did it!

How Something Works:

There doesn’t need to be a clear motivation here other than what are you interested in learning?

When you’re trying to figure out how something works for a project or to describe a project management strategy that you are using in your project, writing an explanation of how it works is a good excuse to dive in and find out more.

“Do you wonder how [blank] works? I’m going to show you how [blank] is implemented. It does this and that. Now I’ve shown you how it works.”

Review:

Use reviews to describe and analyze instead of evaluating. It’s tempting to evaluate projects or processes on a good-bad axis, but this isn’t very useful. What is this thing good for?

“I used or implemented [blank]. This is what it is. This is what my experience was like. [Blank] has these strengths and weaknesses. In conclusion, it’s best when using these certain criteria to evaluate it.”

Now that you have a template, let’s talk about the writing process.

Writing Resources

Writing is like coding – you have to practice at it. And just like with coding, you should utilize your resources to help you through the writing process:

  • Power Thesaurus: Stuck on a word? Power Thesaurus is a crowdsourced tool that provides users with a ton of alternative word choices from a community of writers.
  • ZenPen: If you’re having trouble staying focused, check out this distraction-free writing tool. ZenPen creates a minimalist “writing zone” that’s designed to help you get words down without having to fuss with formatting right away.
  • Cliché Finder: Feeling like your writing might be coming off a little cheesy? Identify instances where you can be more specific using this handy cliché tool.
  • Hemingway App – Analyzes your sentence structures for readability and improvements.
  • Wordcounter.net – In addition to counting your words, it also calculates reading time.
  • Here are more tools to help you with your writing

Utilize Peer Review

The peer review process is similar to soliciting feedback on a project. As you draft your post, here are some tools to help you stay on top of revisions:

Use Your Network

Now that you have a blog post, you need people to read it! As mentioned above, Medium is an excellent platform to write your blog post on as it’s easy to post to other forms of social media or back to your own personal site.

How to Practice This

Choose a format to write from and begin brainstorming a technical blog post. Discuss this with your PD peer group members and make sure to ask them for peer review.