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.

Mixing humor into serious communication comes at the expense of authenticity. It's difficult to know what an author really means when they mix attempts at humor into the writing (and this is often deliberate, if someone makes a particularly spicy political remark, it's usually in the form of a joke, in order to shield from potential backlash). Overall it's a style of writing that feels sophomoric and insecure, as though the message itself isn't enough so there's a need to crack jokes to compensate. This successfully distracts from the message you're trying to convey, ... at the expense of clarity.