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.

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.