How to Write Blog Posts That Developers Read · Refactoring English

Summary

I recently spoke to a developer who tried blogging but gave up because nobody was reading his posts. I checked out his blog, and it was immediately obvious why he didn’t have any readers.The developer had interesting insights, but he made so many mistakes in presenting his ideas that he was driving everyone away. The tragedy was that these errors were easy to fix. Once you learn to recognize them, they feel obvious, but some bloggers make these mistakes for years.I know because I’m one of them.I’ve been blogging about software development for nine years. My best posts have reached 300k+ readers, but many of them flopped, especially in my first few years.Over time, I’ve learned techniques that help some blog posts succeed and the pitfalls that cause others to languish in obscurity.Why listen to me?🔗I’m going to say a bunch of gloaty things to establish credibility, but it feels gross, so let’s just get it out of the way:I’ve written a software blog for nine years, and it attracts 300k-500k unique readers per year.My posts have reached the front page of Hacker News over 30 times, many of them reaching the #1 spot.I launched a successful indie business by writing a popular blog post about my product.My articles frequently appear on reddit and Lobsters.My software blog receives 300k-500k unique readers per year.I don’t claim to be the world’s best software blogger, but I’ve had enough success and experience to share some useful lessons.Get to the point🔗The biggest mistake software bloggers make is meandering.Often, the author has some valuable insight to share, but they squander their first seven paragraphs on the history of functional programming and a trip they took to Bell Labs in 1973. By the time they get to the part that’s actually interesting, everyone has long since closed the browser tab.Internet attention spans are short. If you dawdle before making your point, the reader will seek out one of the literally billions of other articles they could be reading inste...