Writer’s Block? 5 Blog Post Ideas for Developers

Editor’s note: Chris Le is a software engineer at Conductor but he’s also a whiz at SEO, having spent the better part of a decade building search marketing expertise in his professional and personal life. As such, the suggestions below are great for sparking ideas for tech blogging, but they’re also informed by best practices for creating content that’s relevant for users of organic search.

Coming up with topics for blog posts is easy for bloggers. But for those of us who end statements with semicolons instead of periods, it can be easy to feel like we suffer from writers’ block. Never fear! There are lots of places to look for inspiration for blog posts. Here are my five favorite places to find ideas for content.

1. Opinions. Do you have them?

Come on, dude. I know you do. For example, what if I asked you, “Which is better, vim or Emacs?” Your opinions are great sources for blog posts. Why is a technology great? How will it save me time? How will it keep me from creating bugs?

2. Questions on Quora.com

Type the name of any technology into Quora.com and look for interesting questions that you can answer. An answer to a question makes for a great blog post because, obviously, someone wants to know it. Lump this in with your strong opinions and you’ve got a blog post that’s sure to get on the first page of Hacker News.

3. Answers on StackOverflow

Just because a question’s already been answered doesn’t mean you can’t blog about it. The fact that you found an answer on StackOverflow means that someone else had the same problem before you and solved it. Write a post that provides a narrative around the resolution of your problem. What did you need help with? How well did the author’s solution work for you? How did your results differ from theirs?

Chris T, our resident Git guru, answers a lot of questions on StackOverflow . I hope he blogs about Git soon! (Hint, hint…)

4. Did you figure out how to do something cool?

We’re always learning. The best way to know that you’ve synthesized what you’ve learned is by teaching it to others. Did you just learn how to make a Chrome Extension? Tell the rest of us! Did you just learn how to deploy your application to AWS with one command? Show us how!

Here’s an example of the epic: Alex uses Puppet to make deploying laptops easy .

5. Use Google Suggest

Go to Google and type in the name of a technology, followed by a space, followed by “vs” — but don’t press enter. Let Google Suggest tell you what other developers are comparing. Write a blog post comparing those two pieces of technology yourself. Extra points if you blog about the JavaScript flavor of the month.

So there you have it: Five tools to get content ideas so you can tell the world how everyone else is doing it wrong.