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Writing a technical article/blog 101 ✍

Vaibhav Khulbe on March 03, 2020

Shoutout to @tringakrasniqi who inspired me to write this article. 😊 I've been writing technical blogs for quite some time now. Over these years, ...

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David Patrick • Mar 3 '20

Nice Article! Anyone in search of technical details in writing, Google has a great source they use for their engineers developers.google.com/tech-writing

Dhruv garg • Dec 27 '20

Thanks, David. I was looking for something like this.

Vaibhav Khulbe • Mar 4 '20

Thanks for the link David!

Simon Shine • Oct 14 '20 • Edited

As someone who is familiar with writing but new to blogging, the following tips were new to me: ask for feedback, and use a cover image. I will ask for feedback in my next post, which will be about some software that I release, so it should be perfect.

I'm still not convinced how to pick a cover image; I could pick random art from my artist friends to simply promote it. Considering that I aim for cover images to hold no other information value, that is probably what I'll do. Thanks for motivating the thought. :-)

On the subject of composition one could elaborate even more; I like to think of online "short-form" reading like downloading JPEGs on a modem where you get gradually finer pixelation:

The title: You can only really specify the domain.
The caption ("tl;dr: ..."): You can summarize your findings in one short sentence.
The first paragraph: You can summarize the most important part of your findings in 3-4 short lines.
The rest of the article should proceed in a similar fashion. How "beginning, middle and end" work is covered better elsewhere.

At any point, the reader will quit. Give them as much as you can with as little as possible. This style of writing is not "long-form" as demonstrated e.g. by VICE and has its limitations. But I would rather always keep reading to at most 5 minutes. This blog post of yours says 5 minutes, too.

Vaibhav Khulbe • Oct 15 '20

Great points here! Thanks for this comment :)

Binyamin Green • Mar 3 '20

Question for you: How does one get ideas for articles?

Vaibhav Khulbe • Mar 4 '20 • Edited

Great question Binyamin! Here are a few points regarding the same:

Ask yourself. What do you want to share with the world? Any tip? A tutorial? A new tech stack you learned? Some cons or pros of a language? There can be thousands of such ideas at your disposal once you start asking yourself!
Interact with others. The more you communicate (both online/offline), the more knowledge you gain and the more ideas your brain creates!
Hop into trends! Google has it's own Trends website, pick a topic and share the knowledge.
Join communities. This helps in getting more buzzwords and tech words/skills which you may want to discover and then write about it.
Follow Aleksandr's points!

Binyamin Green • Mar 4 '20

This is one of those moments where I wish I could save comments on DEV!
@ben nudge nudge

Vaibhav Khulbe • Mar 4 '20

Manuel Osorio • Jun 16 '21 • Edited

This is a great article and the discussions on here are also very insightful. I was looking up information on technical writing because I this is something I want to start doing soon, as a way to share what I've been learning especially for problems that took lots of research, such as reading documentation or forums threads, to find a solution that works. In the case of forum threads I usually find conversations that lead me to a solution of my own.

Vaibhav Khulbe • Jun 16 '21

Thanks for reading @manuelosorio ! :)

bgauryy • Mar 3 '20

Also,
Ask for review before publishing technical stuff, but don't let othes change your "voice".

Vaibhav Khulbe • Mar 4 '20

Binyamin Green • Mar 3 '20

That was a very well written article with some excellent tips. Thank You!

Vaibhav Khulbe • Mar 4 '20

Shaiju T • Mar 3 '20

Technical articles are not here to teach Oxford English. 😄 But it should make us write Good and better English.

Vaibhav Khulbe • Mar 4 '20

Agree!

Malcolm R. Kente • Mar 4 '20

Some really good tips here! Thanks for sharing this 👍

Vaibhav Khulbe • Mar 4 '20

I'm glad you found it good. 😀

Tringa Krasniqi • Mar 4 '20

Great article!! It is so great to find advice on how to write quality technical posts. I am sure these tips will help anyone trying to get better at writing (including me :)) Good work!