How to write blog posts that developers read

So long as your article has a decent enough structure – which this article makes it seem is the only thing that matters – I reckon there are two ways to make blog posts that developers read and share;

1. make so many of them, you'll repeatedly hit gold eventually

2. go the extra yard with research and/or effort

The intro's "The developer had interesting insights" makes it sound like they failed blog was full of opinion pieces. Very few opinion pieces succeed, but they're the easiest to write (i.e. the first category). It might work for some people, but for us unknowns, nobody really cares. Go the extra yard and make it interesting by doing a deep dive of the subject.

I've fully focussed on the second approach. As a consequence, each article takes a lot of time to complete, so I generally don't finish more than one per month. I try to make them all something I can actually be proud of (which is quite a challenge), and then I spend a lot of time tweaking the structure, making things less verbose, and improving scanability – I rely on making sentences bold a lot for that. I try to use relevant images, but I find actually helpful ones are hard to make for developer content. While hiring illustrators is a good idea, I doubt many writers are willing to pay for that.

To make my articles more interesting, I try to make a custom component for each article to spice it up and slowly grow the component library I have available for my blog. It doesn't always work though – for my last article I spent several hours building an easter egg that only 22 people (<0.1%) interacted with it.

>So long as your article has a decent enough structure – which this article makes it seem is the only thing that matters.

Author here.

I hope I didn't give the impression that structure is all that matters, as that's not what I believe.

I think all the usual advice about choosing an interesting topic and writing well apply too, but I tried to focus in this article on blogging advice I don't see people discuss.

I spend something like 5 or so months on each one I write. I'm aiming for substantive work with original research to be an actual contribution.

> I've fully focussed on the second approach. As a consequence, each article takes a lot of time to complete, so I generally don't finish more than one per month.

This is what I've been running into. My approach comes out of writing a bunch of code or re-writing the same sort of code across multiple projects and realizing it would be useful to share. Next I'll dump all the code into a blog post and have to start formulating what the structure of the post will be. What content do I need to add to support my claims that this code is correct (or correct enough to use)? Add in time to research alternative approaches to the code, research and write about the alternatives.

I've found that I'm proud of my finished articles but it takes awhile to get them written. I'm in the midst of one that I've kind of hit a writers block on because I have a fair bit of research left to do. I haven't been motivated to do the research and write up the findings. However, I feel like thats normal and I'll get back to it at some point.

fellow writer here

you can have your cake and eat it too: TLDR, create a multi tier system

do a bunch of short form posts and see what gets abnormal traction from others / gets referenced by YOU more

THEN you invest the time to go the extra yard

this way you dont overinvest in what isnt popular and you also get multiple "shots on goal"

ex: https://www.swyx.io/bottom-up-ideas

I would absolutely not go the extra yard with research/effort until you have an audience for your blog. I've seen plenty of well thought out, in depth posts get zero traction because the blog wasn't established, and plenty of off the cuff short brain dump posts from established blogs get front page HN traction.

This wasn't my experience. Hacker News felt surprisingly welcoming as soon as I upped the depth and reduced the opinion.

There are some areas I noticed Hacker News isn't very interested in, such as web accessibility (other platforms picked that up much better), but I think that has more to do with the not-as-exciting subject than the writer/blog.