Write That First Blog

Lately, I've been getting a lot of questions from friends and co-workers on how to write their first technical blog.

My advice? Just write it.

If I read my first article now, about try-catch-finally in Visual Basic .Net, I can't help but laugh at its simplicity. I was programming for about four months, my employer decided some co-workers and I needed some training, and so someone came over and taught us the basics of .NET, of which try-catch-finally blocks were one.

What Matters in Your Article

The first question I often get from programmers who want to start writing blog posts is about writing style. How do you speak to your audience?

My answer: Personally, I like to write as if I'm talking to the reader. I use words like “I,” “you,” and “we” in the hopes that it's engaging to readers.

Another style I often see is avoiding words like “I” and “you” by using “one.” An example: instead of “you should implement an interface,” they write “one should implement an interface.”

Mind Your Language

That brings me to another point: language. Many would-be writers fear that their English is not good enough to write an article.

First of all, even if English isn’t your native language, that doesn't mean you can’t write a good article. Second, the goal of your article is to teach people, so code samples often matter more than grammar. I've seen articles with poor grammar win competitions because they were technically interesting and accurate.

I'll tell you another secret: Simple Programmer has a plugin installed, called Yoast for SEO, that checks if my text is readable. It checks if there aren't too many words per sentence or paragraph. It also keeps track of headers and words under a header. There also appears to be some readability index (Flesch Reading Ease), and more.

Explaining Everything

I like to mention such details, as the reader might be wondering about this himself, and it saves the reader the trouble of looking it up. If I notice a detail like that, but I can't find why things are that way, I mention that too.

Code Samples

If you're doing an article on a piece of code, probably more important than anything in your article are your code samples.

I write my code for articles differently than I write my code for work. At work, I'm assuming my code will be read by professionals who know what they're doing.

query MyQuery {
  allStrapiProjects(filter: {featured: {eq: true}}) {
    nodes {
      id
      title
      description
      github
      url
     }
   }
}

Now Get to Writing

Now it's up to you! Make a blog, or maybe you already have one or find a website where you can write your own articles. There are plenty of resources on the internet to get started. So you really have no excuses to get writing!

And once you get to writing, be sure to keep going at it!

Good luck!