How to write blog posts that developers read

My general takes (as someone who also has a somewhat popular blog) is that

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.

> 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.

This sounds similar to what I was taught, in high school ~30 years ago, about journalism. When you write an article for the paper, the first sentence should have the who, what, when, where. The reader should be able to get the basic, relevant information from the first sentence then start giving more details as you go along. This is not only for the reader but to make it easier for the editor if/when they need to cut an article short then they can just cut text from the end.

> the first sentence should have the who, what, when, where

I utterly despise modern long form journalism which does not establish any of these things until 1/3 through the article. It’s infuriating.

The articles were intended for you to read. If you find them annoying, maybe they weren't written for you.

> The articles were intended for you to read

Or they were intended for you to scroll further on the page and load more ads and autoplay videos.

Good essays start with their thesis, expand upon that, and conclude by bringing it back to it.

There is no reason journalism should veer away from a format that works for one goal (information dissemination), unless there are other goals at play (longer engagement).