How to write technical blog?
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway
Why write technical blog?
As you can see, many great developers write technical blog. So, why do they do that? And why you should write too?
Share your knowledge
Indeed, they write to share their knowledge, to teach you or the newcomers about things they have mastered.
The Dalai Lama has said: “Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality”
For you, your brain is not good enough to remember things forever, it fades over time. So, write it down. The Internet is better than your brain.
Improve your knowledge
To write a good technical post, even a short technical note, you need to read a lot.
By reading a lot, you will improve your knowledge, about the topic you will write, and many other related topics.
And when you share it on the Internet, you can validate your knowledge. People will ask you many questions, or they will point out your mistakes, give you advices, suggest you the better solution,…
Get famous in the community
If you are an active technical blogger, sure you will get familiar in the community.
Become a well-known developer in the community is a good chance to improve your career, or… you can earn more karma.
So, how to write a technical blog?
There is no rule to write blog. Anyone can blog in their own way.
So, I will not tell you which steps you need to follow to write a blog. I’m just share my experiences.
Step 0: Research
Never write until you understand about what you gonna write.
Step 1: Outlining
Outlining is a great way to organize your post. For sure you can write without outlining, but if you’re not good enough, the reader will understand nothing and even you will get lost when you write.
You can do outlining with any tool you have: a Notebook, Sublime, Atom, Evernote,…
For me, I prefer using Medium because its distract-free editor. Here is how I use it to outlining my next post.
If you want, you can add more detail for your outline. It will very helpful for the next step.
Or you can sketch your ideas, like this:
Step 2: Writing
Writing is nothing but adding text to the outline.
Sometimes, you have to explain about the technical things, make sure you do it as simple as possible. The reader don’t want to read too much, use images instead.
Your writing style is also important, it defines yourself, your own brand. When the reader read your posts, he knows nobody else but you, wrote it.
If you are writing in the IDEs like Sublime or Atom, it’s fun to organize your writing workspace, so it can inspire you, for example, here is mine:
It’s nothing to do with the formatting right now. Focus on formatting during writing will slow you down, so don’t care about it, we will do it later.
Step 3: Formatting
When you are done writing, it’s time to give your post some nice looking.
Bold the headers, make them bigger. Use large font for your blog make it easier to read, more comfortable for reader’s eyes.
Don’t forget to highlight keywords, names. Use syntax highlight for source codes or insert it via Github Gist.
Find the suitable images to describe your idea, and don’t make it break the blog’s style.
If you can, create your own images using softwares like Photoshop, Illustrator or Sketch 3, or even with your hand drawn sketches.
Flat style and doodles are two best style for blog posts since they are clean and minimal, but still provides enough information as we need.
Last step: Proofreading
Don’t hurry to press the “Publish” button, you still have a lot of works to do.
At this time, you have finished your post, but you need some friends to do the proofreading, listen to their feedbacks. Don’t fail the technical things.
Never do proofreading by yourself, you never realize your mistake until somebody else pointed it out.
It’s not everything
When your post got published, it’s not the end.
You have a long journey ahead: promoting your post, answering comments, update your post,…
But it’s another journey, we will talk about it in another post.
