Tools + Tips for Writing Tech Blogs
Make your tech blog fun and your own!
I’ve been writing on Medium for a little while now and picked up some tips and tricks along the way. Everyone has their own style and voice in writing, but I wanted to share some really neat and creative tools to share your ideas in a way that suits you!
Whether you’re looking to contribute to Kotlin Thursdays or just want some tips on writing tech blogs here on Medium, here are a couple resources and tidbits you might find helpful to make the best of what you want to communicate!
Medium Subtitles, Features, and Formatting
Couldn’t figure out how to write subtitles for the longest time. For a while, I would just copy existing subtitles in my Medium blogs — if you write underneath your title and highlight the text, you can click the smaller T to create a subtitle.
You will also be interested in having an image featured in your articles. Medium has helpful documentation for featuring images. Why do this? The reason for this is for card creation when sharing your blogs on social media.
Without it, the links would look like this. Users are less likely to click
Medium also has helpful documentation for formatting your blogs.
Code Snippets
You can create code snippets a couple different ways — I find some helpful for particular purposes. For short code snippets, you can use three backticks for formatting that looks like this:
fun printAnimalFacts()For larger snippets of code, it may be hard to look at the text. Medium has the ability to use gist.github.com snippets for easy formatting. Create a gist and copy the link and paste it in to your medium blog and press Enter.
Sometimes, I use PowerPoint (or Google Slides) for things it was never intended for. One of my favorite things to do with PowerPoint is to use it for breaking down scary-looking code like this:
A coworker also sent me an interesting tool for code snippet creation called carbon.now.sh. If this is more your speed, feel free to try it for yourself!
Diagrams to explain abstract concepts
There are different kinds of learners, and if you’re anything like I am, I have to be explained the same difficult concept multiple times and in different ways. I learn best visually, and I find drawing diagrams can really supplement the explanation of those abstract concepts!
I’ll shamelessly bring up PowerPoint again provided in a screenshot below. I don’t even care. Google Drawing, and Paintbrush are other great alternatives to creating drawings and diagrams as well.
One of my other favorite resources for intense diagramming is draw.io. You can always save your works to Google Drive, link and share to others for collaboration, and export them into PNGs, PDFs, and more. They also have a quick and easy search bar to insert icons!
I use draw.io frequently at work for documentation but found it to be incredibly useful for graphing out those complex topics. I use my creations to explain data flow concepts, code organization, code architecture, and more.
That’s all I have for now. If you have cool tools and resources you use, please feel free to comment and share below!
