Here is how to get passive income and boost your career
Most developers love their craft and spend hours not just writing code and solving problems, but actively engaging with the community and trying to learn new things. But as a developer have you thought of how contributing to the community can help you become a better one? I suppose you just did :) Think about it for a bit then think about how many developers are contributing to this community and why are they doing this?
Writing an article is a time-consuming process and you can’t keep writing just to write unless you’re a writer but I suppose you’re a developer. So I am gonna explain what is technical writing and Why you should start writing right after this article.
What is technical writing? ✍️
Technical writing is not just about understanding technical information and recording it in a document. Technical writing takes high-level information and processes it into digestible content for a specific audience.
Technical writing is defined by the Society of Technical Communication as
“any form of communication that shows one or more of the following qualities:
Communicating about technical or specialized topics, such as computer applications, medical procedures, or environmental regulations.
Communicating by using technology, such as web pages, help files, or social media sites.
Providing instructions about how to do something, regardless of how technical the task is or even if technology is used to create or distribute that communication.”
This writing style covers any type of text that aims to explain detailed information, a tutorial, or how-to articles. A technical writer communicates in a way that presents technical information so that the reader can use that information for an intended purpose like learning about a new technology or learning how to do a task related to a technical thing like coding.
What to expect from doing technical writing?
Improves your communication skills ⬆️
technical writing can help you communicate more easily with your teammates. If you’re collaborating with other software developers regularly, you know the importance of exchanging ideas, ensuring you’re working for the same high-level goals, and solving problems together. Technical writing abilities help you formally structure these bits of communication so your coworkers can better understand them, with an efficiently written message, you can avoid most misconceptions and ultimately work faster.
Improves your problem-solving skills 🚀
Developers are problem solvers. Technical writing forces you to get into the habit of putting abstract concepts into understandable words, it broadens your vocabulary, and in some ways changes how you think about the world. You may not realize it right away, but this change in mindset will be invaluable in how you conceptualize and deal with technical problems (not to mention communicating those problems to others).
Career value ✨
Technical writing makes you a more valuable employee or vendor, possibly earning you a raise if you can implement the skill appropriately. It also gives you a future career option in technical writing, should you ever lose interest in software development.
And of course money 💵
Technical writing can be a great way of earning passive income, there are many websites like digital ocean, circle ci,tutorialsPoint and so many other websites that pay you about 300$ for a good article on their blog.
Writing for other blogs is not the only way to earn that passive income, you can start your own blog and write how-to tutorials or even detailed courses or just share your ideas and this can earn you a lot. You can start here in medium with their partnership program or you can monetize your website using Google Adsense or affiliate marketing.
Learn to be a technical writer
I believe this article is the best one to start with, it’s super detailed and it will help you find your way :)
Where to share your articles
Personally, The best platforms for technical articles are Medium and Linkedin, those two can really boost your career and put your articles in front of the right audience.
You can also contribute to Quora to drive more audience to your articles.
