How to write blog posts that developers read

The inverted pyramid is almost always the correct format for your text. I often put the tweet-length version of the post in the title or first paragraph. Get to the point quickly, then elaborate. Means you can bail out at any point of the text and still take home most of what mattered, while the meticulous crowd can have their nitpicks addressed toward the end.

The problem of finding an audience is best solved by being really transparent about what you're about. Inverted pyramid solves that. There's no point to drawing in people who aren't going to be interested. Retaining existing readers beats capturing new readers.

I'm less bullish on images, unless they are profoundly relevant to the text. Illustrations for the sake of having illustrations are no bueno in my opinion. You want to reduce distractions and visual noise. Images should above all never be funny.

>I'm less bullish on images, unless they are profoundly relevant to the text. Illustrations for the sake of having illustrations are no bueno in my opinion. You want to reduce distractions and visual noise.

I'll respectfully disagree on this one. You can overdo images, but I think readers find a wall of text intimidating and visually too boring, but this is a matter of taste.

>Images should above all never be funny.

I strongly disagree with this. It's like saying a technical blog post should never have jokes.

Why should an image never be funny?

I think you absolutely can mix humor and useful technical insights. xkcd is probably the best example, but there are lots of authors that complement their writing with humor, both in images and in text.

Jokes in HN comments typically don't play well if the whole point of the comment is to make a joke, but if you make a joke in service of a substantive point or attach a joke to an otherwise meaningful comment, there's usually a good response.

I've come to appreciate HN's cultural norms around jokes because if you compare discussion to something like reddit, the top comment is often just a joke or a pop culture quote and then a massive thread of people just talking about the joke or reference rather than the actual story. I think HN's norms do a better job of fostering curious discussion.