Writing for Developers: Blogs That Get Read

Pragmatic methods for writing blogs, articles, and other technical pieces that stand out from the crowd!

Do you want to connect with your community, share your state-of-the-art achievements, and help your peers benefit from your hard-fought lessons learned? Do you want to get the kind of attention that expands your career? Master the art of writing engineering blog posts and articles! This comprehensive guide shows you how to create content your fellow developers will love to read and share.

Writing for Developers is full of the practical tips, tricks, and techniques you need to translate the ideas floating around your head into content that’s clear and compelling, including how to:

• Pinpoint topics that make intriguing posts
• Apply popular blog post design patterns
• Rapidly plan, draft, and optimize blog posts
• Make your content clearer and more convincing to technical readers
• Tap AI for revision while avoiding misuses and abuses
• Increase the impact of all your technical communications

Whether you’re brand new to writing, or a seasoned hand who wants more attention for your work, Writing for Developers will help ensure your writing resonates with readers. This isn’t a generic writing guide—from start to finish, the book is laser-focused on technical topics, writers, and audiences. Authors Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop combine their differing perspectives as an engineer and professional writer to help you write compelling works. You’ll learn through detailed examples, methodical strategies, and a “punk rock DIY attitude!”

Foreword by Bryan Cantrill. Afterword by Scott Hanselman.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the technology

A well-crafted technical article can spark a new idea, demystify a technology, expand your perspective, or save you from going down a disastrous path. Even if you don’t consider yourself a “good writer,” you can make a difference by sharing insights and advancing the community. This practical guide shows you how to create blogs, articles, and other content your fellow developers will want to read and share.

About the book

Writing for Developers introduces seven popular patterns for modern engineering blogs—such as “The Bug Hunt,” “We Rewrote It in X,” and “How We Built It”—and helps you match these patterns with your ideas. This book covers the entire writing process, from brainstorming, planning, and revising, to promoting your blog in ways that build reputation and generate further opportunities.

What's inside

• Rapidly plan, draft, and review your content
• Build on popular blog post design patterns
• Support your writing with AI
• Increase the impact of all your communications

About the reader

For developers and engineers of all ability levels—even if you’re not a native English speaker and never took a writing class in your life.

About the author

Piotr Sarna is a software engineer and an experienced book and blog author. Cynthia Dunlop has been writing for and with developers for 20+ years.

Table of Contents

Part 1
1 Why write
2 What to write
3 Captivating readers
Part 2
4 Creating your working draft
5 Optimizing your draft
6 Getting feedback
7 Ship it
Part 3
8 The “Bug Hunt” pattern
9 The “Rewrote It in X” pattern
10 The “How We Built It” pattern
11 The “Lessons Learned” pattern
12 The “Thoughts on Trends” pattern
13 The “Non-markety Product Perspectives” pattern
14 The “Benchmarks and Test Results” pattern
Part 4
15 Getting attention
16 From blog post to conference talk
17 So you want to write a book
A Publishing and writing resources
B AI uses and abuses

Piotr Sarna is a fearless technologist who dives headfirst into fun engineering challenges like forking SQLite for modern distributed apps, introducing Rust & Wasm into C++ projects, and contributing to the Linux kernel. He’s an experienced book author, tech reviewer, speaker, and blog author. Piotr graduated from University of Warsaw with an MSc in Computer Science.

Cynthia Dunlop has been writing for and with developers for 20+ years, covering topics across C/C++, Java, testing, DevOps, and back-end infrastructure. She’s behind several technical books, hundreds of articles, and countless blogs. Cynthia holds a BA from UCLA and an MA from Washington State University, where she taught writing once upon a time.