#221 - Writing for Developers: How to Create Content People Read and Share - Piotr Sarna

You're not writing enough. Most of engineers that have something interesting to say do not aspire to write at all. They're actually perfectly comfortable writing with very good code, but not very good prose for various reasons. The sad truth is that if you as a new author write your faults on something, just nobody cares at all unless you do some kind of promotion, then nobody's going to ever read it. So. In your book you also cover these few things called blog post patterns.

So for some of us who are like beginners in terms of writing that we could try out. Backhunt is my favorite. There is a post and that explains how somebody looked for a bug in the code. It's usually structured like a detective story a little bit. What is the impact of AI these days? Could it actually help us in terms of writing our content? Everyone seen a DPT generated article? At this moment they are just pure garbage. They're useless.

Most of them have obvious logical fallacies or great app. It's something a little different which is using them as. LLM model or which tool that you think are good enough for helping us? To write the easiest answer which I use is Oval. It's best to just spin up everything that you have access to and just ask the same question often that there is no clear winner. How do you actually overcome this? Kind of like common excuses for people who do not love writing at all.

The best thing to do to overcome all kinds of excuses is to just. Hello everyone, welcome back to another new episode of the Technician podcast. Today I have with me the author of the book titled Writing for Developers. His name is Piotr Sarna. So I'm sure when you hear about this topic, a lot of us want to write, but many of us just couldn't write for some reasons. So hopefully today Sarna is able to help us, guide us how we can start it, how we can get started

to write. And welcome to the show, Sarna. Thanks for inviting me and hello everyone.

Sarna, I always love to invite my guest first to share about maybe yourself by sharing any career turning points that you think we all can learn from you. Sure. The first career turning point was definitely me joining a company that works on an open source product, which was a distributed file system, and I stayed in open source for years later. The next turning point was Cila DB, which was super high quality open source product. And that's where I learned really a lot.

But my latest turning point was joining the AI hype, which is hopefully not just not just a hype, but actually a new era, which is from a year ago. So these are, yeah, I've actually have at least three of those points, but those are the ones that stand out. Yeah, I saw from your profile you are also active in open source, right? You are active as a maintainer in the LIP sequel and Cela DB, right? So tell us, how do you actually juggle your full time job? Maybe with your open source

maintainer contributions? Oh, that's very easy because actually both of those are more of honorary titles right now. I actually don't spend too much time on those anymore. I do miss them sometimes, but there's only there's so much time I can spend on them. I do sometimes work on my let's say weekend projects that are also open source, but mostly I I'm focused on my full time job at the moment.

Right. And maybe a little bit of the AI have that you mentioned just sharing what are you up to these days, right. So what kind of problems are you solving? So last year, last year, in a month, I guess, I joined Poolside, which is one of the companies that works on those largest large language models.

I'm not sure how much I can spell before we release a product because it's under, you know, 19 layers of Ndas, but they are working provide well, hopefully state-of-the-art best models for programming, for helping people to program. So think per programmer that is really smart. All right, So fingers crossed that we can see some new cool things. I feel that every few days or even not months, right, we will see a lot more new things happening in the AI, especially with coding, right?

So maybe one day we'll see poolside as well as one of the solutions. Oh, definitely, yeah.

Yeah. So let's dive in into our topic for today, right? Writing for developers. I'm sure many of developers like I mentioned, right? We all aspire to start writing something, right? It could be blog post, newsletter, it could be even like other types of contents. But somehow we've felt that we are not good enough. Probably our writing is not up to the mark or things like that, right? Or we are technical, we don't know how to write better. So maybe let's start from this, right?

How do you actually see this kind of problem happening? Maybe outside of your, you know, like your work, right? Like in the developers in general, how do you see developers having this challenge of writing I? Would go even one step further to the negative end and say that most of engineers that have something interesting to say do not aspire to write at all. That's the that's the first bit that they are actually perfectly comfortable writing.

Very good code, but not very good prose or any kind of prose for various reasons. Everyone has their own. But the first thing that would help both sides, both engineers that would aspire to write and those that actually don't aspire to write but should write because that would be education of it would be to have writing culture somehow included in the company they work at. That that's what bootstrapped me and quite a few of my colleagues as well.

So that would be, yeah, that would be a very good starting point because most engineers are not alone. They work at some kind of company, be it startup or the corporation, but any kind of company would it could have a right in culture. I find it interesting when you

mentioned many developers actually don't aspire to write. I guess in a sense that makes sense. Also for some developers, they just are happy to write code, write all day long. So you mentioned about writing culture. I think for some people they may be unfortunate right enough to actually work in companies that are all about, you know, actions, just delivering code features and all that and not spending time to actually write.

So tell us what the importance of this writing culture in such a way that actually it influences you to want to write? So I think most of the companies would actually benefit from introducing some kind of writing culture. Like it's enough to just take a look at some of the top companies in the world that also have top engineering blogs.

Like when Netflix blog puts something out, it's usually very interesting and it I think it's still maybe doesn't help them sell more subscriptions to people who watch TV series, but it definitely helps gather best talent because engineers write and read those engineering blogs. So they could be lured to apply to Netflix if they see an interesting problem, for instance. So from company's side, I think it's beneficial even just for hiring purposes to have an engineering block.

But then it's also a knowledge base, the best kind because it's usually made of actual real life experience. And from the developer's side, well, there's so many advantages for you as an outer. One of the advantages is that you need to kind of understand what you implemented to write about it. So it's clarifies what what you create. Sometimes you can even find a bug after trying to explain something and figure out that there's a corner place that you missed.

Another thing would be that perhaps you want to work on your personal brand even as a developer isn't interested in becoming famous. It's not exactly about being famous or not. It's also about meeting other people from same niche, from the same industry. Then you can go one step further above blogging and also take part in conferences, some kind of online meetups, on site meetups, all kinds of things. So yeah, they're endless.

Or do you need to see if you have to start writing and get some kind of recognition, because some people are bound to read it? Right, So maybe can you also

share your personal experience, right? Because I, I saw that you come from a technical background, right? And all this super technical coding experience up to you writing this book, right? Because writing this book itself is like 1 implementation of writing for developers, right? So tell us your personal journey. How do you end up writing this book? So this particular book is a continuation of previous book that I also co-authored with

three other people. This time it all started at Cilla DB, which has a very strong writing culture, blogging culture. It's strong to the point that you're pretty much forced to write about something from time to time, especially if you delivered something interesting technologically. It's very natural after you spend some time working at Cilla DB that you even feel that after you release something interesting, there's going to be a request for writing A blog post about it.

So you might just as well start even before that, or volunteer. I think first five or seven or eight blog posts of mine were released simply as part of this blogging culture. Then Celadibi also organized the conference. It was bugged, then called Celadibi Summit. Now it's diverged into a few online conferences. Then it was on an Onset conference in San Francisco. I also spoke about one of these topics from my blog posts.

So that was another thing and and another pretty much result of me writing blog posts as well. And then after a few years, I got approached by a publisher, I think after releasing one of the blog posts of code mildly popular. So it was also directly, it was by the maybe blogging and he asked me for if I'm interested in writing a book about Cila. DB actually wasn't interested in writing the book. I got intrigued. So I rerouted him to our marketing and content

department. And from there, Cynthia Michael outer of this latest book got an idea that we could write a more generic book about database performance based on CLDB. What happened? So we released this book. It's an open book, so we can just go ahead and download it. It's like an open source book that you can also buy in paper if you like, or you can just read it online. And after we released that, it's kind of a slippery slope.

You just want to write more. So when Cynthia suggested that maybe you write another book and this whole structure of the latest book was her idea, I just couldn't resist. So I so I ended up working on it and then we released it last year. Well, very interesting, right?

I'm actually intrigued when you mentioned Sila DB actually kind of like forced everyone to write, right? I understand, you know, just that you mentioned about the benefits of, you know, writing for the external thing, right? Maybe for hiring, for the branding, right, for telling more about the companies and all that aspect.

But do you see also having writing culture actually impacting engineering culture, maybe in terms of quality of products, in terms of, you know, best practices or other types of cultural thing? Is there any relation that you see when you were working at CILA DP? Yes, from many angles. Some of it is just actually finding potential bugs and corner cases.

When you try to explain something for examples and you see that you obviously missed something, it might come up in review or you might just find it up yourself. Kind of like rubber debugging, but on text. Another thing is that this is a knowledge base and we often just read that people read A blog post about some feature instead of trying to find them specifically to code, to bootstrap themselves some area of code. Because if it's explained in English, then it's easier to

comprehend potentially. And then there's a whole class of blog posts about benchmarking and test results. It's one of our categories in the book. But the important thing about that is the very benchmarks or anything that you want to publish. It's a tremendous amount of work. So it's it actually makes your product better directly because you need to write all those benchmarks. So you know, have another tool to benchmark your own code. And with benchmarks, the situation is very tough in

blogging. It's a hard category because you're going to get accused of biasing the benchmarks in your favour. It will always happen, but you can do as much as possible to alleviate that, and that means improving your code so that's a more direct effect that blog posts have on products. Yeah. So I can understand that when you write a lot of things, right, the knowledge base aspect is actually really important, right, in engineering, especially as you grow larger,

right? So obviously people want to know certain stuff. You can just direct them to the writings and also things like very technical benchmark or maybe some kind of design docs and things like that definitely can also improve your own understanding and other people's understanding as well. So I think thanks for highlighting that. And obviously, you mentioned

writing itself will take a lot of effort, right? So some people think, you know, apart from me doing the implementation, which is by itself is already a lot of amount of work, I still need to spend a lot of effort to do the right thing. So obviously, this is one of the common blockers or common excuse for people not to write. The other thing is like, yeah, I don't have any other time. I think I'm not a good writer. So tell us, how do you actually

overcome this? Kind of like common excuses for people who do not love writing at all. First of all, if some of the genuinely doesn't like writing, it's better if they just don't. I'm not going to push so hard that everyone should write at all cost. But often those excuses are either being subconsciously lazy or just scared of the unknown, which kind of goes away after

the first blog post. So the best thing to do to overcome all kinds of excuses is to just release a single blog post and see if it's if it really was that bad for all the reasons of it, or if all those excuses were actually void and nonsensical. This is what kind of happened to me. For my first blog post, I didn't really want to write it. I had very hardcore variant of a stage fright where I was actually afraid of somebody reading my piece that I wrote offline.

Which sounds ridiculous but this is just how my brain works apparently. And only after releasing this first blog post I realised that it wasn't really but it was just writing text instead of code and publishing it. And working in open source is actually very similar because people also read your code so why not your text?

Second excuse that I didn't have to personally go through because I don't care that much, but I remember my colleagues having issues with that was if they aren't English native speakers, they wondered if grammar mistakes wouldn't be an issue and they would be ashamed they put something not perfect in there. There are at least two ways to define this excuse 1 is that usually some of your company folks are native English speakers and they could just

review everything. Of course, you can also use automated tools to do that. And the second one is that a good rule of thumb is that if online comments about your article only some grammar mistakes, then it means that the technical purpose flawless. So congratulations, it's like a good always love to get only this kind of feedback and things that they write. Really interesting perspective,

right? So if people need to think about your grammar aspect of the writing, so that means you're kind of like the technical aspect is flawless. So I like that one. So also you mentioned like very interesting insight, right? So you mentioned writing your first blog is similar to like writing your first open source contribution, right? Think of it like this is your first experience and so you're just inexperienced about it. So having other people reading, criticizing your writings, I

think is similar, right? And you'll contribute to open source. So I think let's say people are

interested, so they want to write their first blog post. So obviously the first blocker is like what to write? It seems like these days there are so many plenty of engineering related, technical related blocks already available online. So how do you help us to actually find our first blog post topic? First thing would be to definitely go over whatever you've just implemented a while ago and look at it.

Try to look at it from the perspective of somebody who doesn't know all the internals of the company, for instance. And if it's really that uninteresting because the feature might be super obvious to you because you already know all the code base, you know everything, but it might be very interesting to somebody from the outside. For instance, I suspect that let's take this Netflix, I think

of blog, for example. I guess it's not that interesting of an article for an average Netflix developer who already knows everything about it. But for the rest of the world, it's actually useful knowledge. OK. And another really, really important aspect is that if you think that it's not worth writing about because it was already written somewhere else, then that's just false. There are usually 10's and hundreds of blog posts about the same topic.

So it's not like it's the first person called dips on this topic and nobody else can write about it because it's the combination of a topic and your perspective on it that's potentially useful. That's that might be new information. If there's actually no new information and you just don't have anything interesting to say about something, then don't

write about it naturally. But often it's the personal experience connected to something, implementing something in the language, trying something out that that matters. And that makes, yeah, that produces this unique information that you can put in a post and release it and it will be interesting to someone. Yes, I also learned myself right.

So even though you think there are plenty of, you know, coverage already on a certain particular topic, right, there are always people behind us who are like just starting maybe in their career or starting to use that technology. So there are many kind of a spectrum like it could be beginners content, you know, expert content, like more more expert content. So definitely there are plenty of people who could find your writings very useful.

And don't forget, maybe I think it's also for yourself in the future, right? Maybe what we write today, right, We may not even remember in the future, right? So I think it's also a good thing to actually kind of like remind us what we actually did and what of learnings we got from there. So I think also you mentioned past projects that we think we find it maybe like kind of like

normal common things. But sometimes, you know, if you ask from other people, they think this is super useful and you may want to write something about it so that other people can learn from you, right? So you want to say something? No, I just, I just, I read that definitely. And the one more thing I could add is that technical blog posts out of all category blog posts go out of date extremely fast. It's both dying hyperlinks and the code snippers that don't

compile anymore. So one thing, one aspect of it is to make sure that your blog posts are up to date from time to time, just create the old info. But then that also means that if somebody already wrote about something, this old blog post might be unusable by this. So sometimes it's better to just release something that's. Currently more up to date because it was released yesterday. Yeah, that's a very good point.

I could remember, you know, let's say if I find a particular blog post, but it was written in an older version of the library, sometimes he just couldn't compile all the SDK change dramatically. So I think that's a very good pointer as well. So yeah, just don't be afraid to start writing, you know, whatever topics that you find interesting and important thing is that you can actually contribute something, you know, maybe a more authentic kind of

like a thoughts from you. So writing itself, many people

think, you know, it's super easy for those that come natural for them, right? But for many people, they just don't know where to start, you know, is it the intro? Is it the, you know, the skeleton table of contents, whatever that is? Do you have any tips for us how to start writing? Maybe even like the first draft, right? The first raw content. There are multiple approaches and you need to just find something that works for you personally.

Synface is an expert in forcing people to outline things and kick start their writing process. 2 approaches that are good to try out are as follows. The first one is just start with writing the headers of the paragraphs that aren't there yet. Like what would you like to have? What are your main points of the post? And then just fill them one by one, not necessarily in order, and then just reread everything

and see if it makes sense. But then another opposite approach that may work for some people who are more chaotic perhaps. I often start like that is to dump everything you have in super unstructured form and then fish out the interesting bits and put them into paragraphs and headers and so on. These structures with headers and paragraphs is important. Nonetheless, you should end up

doing this for various reasons. One of them is that people will readers will usually start by scrolling through the article and parsing headers in half a second before they decide if they read everything or not. So you should end up with something structured. The way you end up with something structured depends how your brain works. So might be a matter to start with the structure itself. Might be better to just write to unstructured pages and then figure them out. Yeah.

So I think The thing is like there's no 100% tried and tested methodology, right? I think just start whatever feels natural for us, I guess, right? It could start with the skeleton and all that. But I think nevertheless, in your book, you emphasize these two aspects of writing, the actual draft of their writing, right? Which is to emphasize on the goal, like finding out what is the goal of the writing, right?

And then the second aspect is, why do you think your perspective is actually interesting for this particular blog post, right? Or writing? So tell us why these two aspects are really important when you come up with your writing. So As for getting the draft, yeah, I mean creating the draft and taking the goal, yeah, it depends very much on what your goal is. So if you know what the goal is, then you can pick a process

would work best for you. I mean, it's good if you consider who is going to who in ideal world would be the reader of your post, because it might be that you just want to write it for yourself or for future self, like kind of a personal diary. Maybe you want the wrote public to know about your specific approaches. Maybe you you're targeting a special specific niche for whatever reason, maybe to advertise some cool project of yours and maybe to get some feedback on something.

So that really varies between posts. Some of them are very targeted and some of them are just your thoughts that you would like to publish whatever reason. One very specific goal that lots, lots of writers do have in mind one way or another is optimized specifically for front page copper news. So this is something you should also consider whether you do want it to land there or maybe contrary, you just really don't care if it lands there or not because it's not that kind of a post.

And once you figure that out and then you can know how to structure your blog post to fit. Yeah, so I think for some people they love, you know, ended up in the Hacker News or maybe some Reddit suppose or whatever that is. So I think knowing the goal I think is really important, right, Because that's kind of like narrow down the kind of like the aspects of your writing or be it the topics, big the

structure, big the content. And also you mentioned about understanding the kind of like persona, the readers, right, who are going to read, let's say you're targeting for beginner, don't kind of like mix beginner aspect and advance all in one blog post, I guess. So I think talking about writing

these days, it's inevitable people will use AI in some form of shape to actually help them writing or even including writing most of most parts of the writing itself. So maybe tell us from your point of view, what is the impact of AI these days? Could it actually help us in terms of writing our content? Right.

So the impact measured up to this second, in my personal opinion, is unfortunately quite negative because the direct impact that I see is absolute influx of garbage articles that are clearly AI written and you can subconsciously see that they were just generated without even reading through them. Most of them have obvious both logical fallacies and sometimes we're not even covering the topic that it was supposed to cover. Yeah, everyone's seen GPT

generated article. And at this moment, yeah, they are just pure garbage. They're useless. I haven't seen any kind of content that's generated that's actually high quality that I would have to write. Maybe we'll end up there one day. Right now it definitely isn't the case, but what models today and in the future probably even more. A really great app is something a little different, which is using them as reviewers more or less.

And there are also many ways that you can can use AI to help you make a better blog post from very simple use cases that are pretty much glorified Google search based. For instance, synonyms. If you're stuck and you need a synonym so that you don't repeat yourself too much, but you can't think of a good one. The limbs are great at that because they can just suggest how to rephrase a single sentence so that so that it's you know that's something stuff.

You don't know how to fix it, but hopefully if you see it generated then you will know. Another thing is that they are quite good at judging your post. For instance, you can ask an LLM to point out really logical fallacies that it finds in the post. Often those fallacies aren't real and it was just some hallucinated low quality response. But it's fine because you can just discard it. You're a human being, you can just decide. Sometimes it's really is like a

wow moment at all. I really didn't cover that. It also acts and this is actually a great feature of how LLM architecture is just implemented as of today is that the the only context often that this large language model has is whatever you put in there. So if you're missing something because you subconsciously assume that everybody knows that the model doesn't, so it could point out where does this come from? I don't understand what's the

source of this information. So it's also great for that. Then there are also simple things you can also. You can also use AI for more context aware grammar objects. For instance tenses that you used are coherent and so on. So for all kinds of reviewing without asking your friends to review for you. For all those use cases, AI is great. I already use it and it will only get better. Yeah, very interesting aspect that you mentioned, you haven't found any kind of like good AI

written content, right? So I think most important thing for me also like is the authenticity part of your writing, right? You, I mean, depends on your goal especially, right? So if you just want to produce something and post something under your name, I think maybe that's a different thing. But let's say you want to post something that is useful and you are proud of, I guess the authenticity part actually really matters, right?

So I think AI can help us a lot in terms of what you mentioned, maybe giving feedback, viewing, improving aspects of your writings, right? Choosing the words. Because sometimes, especially if you are not a native English speaker, right, we don't know the best way to convey a particular sentence in a more maybe engaging manner or some different kind of emotion aspect that you want to put to the readers, right? So I think definitely very, very

useful. And in your book, actually, you also cover some tips in terms of what kind of prompts you can ask AI to kind of like improve certain aspects of your writing. So is there any kind of prompts that to you is something that is unexpected, Maybe for some listeners here they could also try it out so that they can actually improve their writing by using that prompts. Is there such things?

So I would suggest to everyone who already wrote anything, any kind of blog post, to go through the kinds of prompts, either the one that I mentioned before or the ones from the book. They're pretty similar. For instance, the ones that ask the model to please find any unclear sentences that weren't explained that their sources unknown. So maybe it's useful to provide this source and to run all the

articles of yours with this. And you might be really surprised that it pointed out something quite important and you should just go and update your old post because something in there was nothing. You assume because you have some kind of industry knowledge or maybe knowledge in there, not to the company that was obvious to you, but it wasn't obvious to the model didn't work if you this company, obviously.

So maybe I know this can quickly get outdated. Is there so from your experience, right. So which LLM model or which tool that you think are kind of like maybe good enough for helping us write us to write something? The easiest answer which I use is although it's best to just spin up everything that you have access to and just ask you the same question, the same list of things to go through because the response is very and often it's there is no clear winner at

least. Well, we checked last year and LLMS are improving daily. But often it was the case that one of the models answered great about pointing out unclear sentences, but totally hallucinated, for instance, logical errors that the contradictions, but while the other shined of contradictions but didn't have a clue about

those second things. So it's best to just spin up all of them because then you've got more, more diverse review and you can just combine everything into a very high quality review, especially that it's not a problem if the review is sound right, false, because then you just discard it. You can just just for yourself if it made any sense or not. And the real advantage is that while your friends might get a little sad and offended if you discard their review, LLMS are

totally fine with that. So, so it's actually, it's actually great to just go with the first round with machines. Very interesting aspect. Yeah, sometimes I also use different models, different tools to actually ask about the same thing, right, and pick out the best things that they, you know, could suggest, right. So I think it's still the same case, I guess, as you mentioned. So I think one other aspect

working with AI, right, especially writing, you know, maybe a blog post, longer form content. Do you advise us to do more like a chunking approach when we finish a certain paragraphs or sections? Or do you suggest us to do in, you know, like after we finish the writing? So any kind of tips how should we work together with AI, right? So is there any kind of like best practice or maybe suggested practice that you find very

useful for yourself? My answer might have been different last year when it released, but now the context window of all these models is large enough to restrict your whole post, so you can iterate and it's the. Usually the paragraphs should be quite self-contained, or at least progressively. It makes some sense so that next paragraph wasn't depend on something from the future, which you can also ask LLM to check. By the way, it's quite, it's

quite with the depth. I would much rather just write the whole thing and then go for the review. But that is just how I work. On the other hand, if you are stuck writing and you get this writers blog that I don't really have so I can't speak from experience, but let's say that you do have it. You can just copy paste whatever you have right now and ask for a nudge. Like how to continue this? What would you latch upon next? Not actual content, but the idea, the suggestion.

What would be a good continuation of this? I think because I'm stuck. Yeah, very interesting. So definitely writer's block is I assume almost everyone will have this kind of like problem, right? So one day you're just stuck like you don't know what next idea to write. So definitely AI could help giving you some prompts, you know, like, OK, maybe you can talk about ABCD and maybe from there we can start picking up again our so hot flow, right? So in your book you also cover

this few things called blog post patterns, right? I think there are a couple of them. I find this very useful. So for some of us who are like beginners in terms of writing, but also narrow down in terms of like what patterns of writing, you know, like the post itself that we could try out. So maybe from your view, what are some of your favourites that maybe you can share to us here and why are they good to start with?

First effect that I first of all I have and I also heard from our readers that they also have is that after you read about all those patterns that we figured out or cover most of the blogosphere, you can't help but qualify everything you see subconsciously and recognize this that oh, this is this is backhand. There are some there are some blog posts that don't fit well into the patterns that we listed. We just picked some that we fought together, cover most of the most of the content out

there. Backhand is the first pattern we explained. And it's also my favorite because just because most of my favorite blog posts happen to be from this category. So I can talk about this one and this one first, It's quite self descriptive, but the bug hunt is about it's a post that explains how somebody looked for a bug in the code. It's usually structured like a

detective story a little bit. Usually at the during the first paragraphs, it's building tension and you don't yet know as as the author, you don't even know what's happening. You're you're trying different things.

And then there is this cathartic paragraph that says we found it and it explains what it was, why some of the previous investigations didn't make sense and why this one was valid and hopefully how to also fix it. This is my favorite blog blog post category, mostly because it's super educational for me, because usually along the way you learn very interesting techniques, how to deal with common issues, let's say.

So if if somebody just sees the effect of a bug that something bad happens, for instance, the program goes out of memory. They usually describe trying out a few techniques, how to check what happens, memory profiling, even debug printing and so on. And one of those works. And then whenever in the future you see a similar issue, it's easy to just remember that they read the blog post about a similar problem. So let's go back to it and try out the same things.

And maybe you hit the same after the same investigation, maybe not, but maybe it was a different issue that was also kind of described in there. This, This is why it's my favorite pattern because it's deeply educational. Almost exclusively. It's you always gain some unique knowledge after reading this kind of blog post. Yeah. So I could remember sometimes when I face a particular challenging box, so to speak, right? So maybe most likely it's the

external related box, right? Be it the library that you use or certain internals of the libraries that somehow just doesn't work with your use case. So finding out this kind of like Buckhand blog post is super useful. It's kind of like safe saving your day, right? So I think Buckhand could be one pattern that you actually explore to write something that is interesting for people to learn. And it's like what you mentioned, right? Super educative when other

people also face the same bug. So other aspects of pattern that

you mentioned is about, you know, covering a certain trends, right? So these days especially, right, you have so many things to talk about AI, the maybe AI replacing developers or maybe the new super cool model that just got released, right? So is this something that also people I don't like? For some people, they like to cover certain trends, right? But for me, I find it quite exhausting because you have to always keep up, right?

So tell us maybe from your perspective, how how effective this kind of pose is? First of all, this, this may be a tiny bit depressing, but it also would be motivating. But the fact is that force on trends, the pattern that we have, that's how we called it and kind of an expert level pattern that you need to to advance to after writing blog

posts from other categories. Because the sad truth is that if you as a new author write your thoughts on some top, there's a very high chance nobody cares at all unless you're given a tiny bit recognizable in your niche, whatever it is. Then people might think, Oh, I would like to know what this guy thinks about about a certain topic.

But if you, if it's your first steps, there's, it might be discouraging because you write something that is deeply personal to you, but nobody reads it because they just scroll through it and didn't find anything uniquely interesting. So this is this is something that we recommend not as the first thing to pick when when writing, because even our examples that we went through are pretty much only from well established bloggers that you

already recognized. And often it's their name, their name combined with the title that makes people actually read it, not just the title, because the title is already hyped. So, so yeah, this is an interesting observation that this is not a beginner friendly pattern, but it it is interesting because usually those bloggers are already experienced. So they're also good at condensing knowledge into a few minutes of reading. And also you can you can see that these patterns have

naturally become serious. For instance, somebody tried out the language and then five years later they write the continuation of this story, going over of all new features and so on. So it is very nice to just go on and read for half a day about the whole story, starting from 1996 to today. Right, wow, I think that that's very unique insight, right. So I I thought that you could actually just cover any trend, but I think it's more like an advanced kind of like a pattern, right.

So maybe you should start with some other patterns first, you know, maybe that is beginners friendly rather than catching up with all the trends. So.

I think 1 aspect after we right finish it is is always good to actually publish it, right? So don't forget to publish it. So publishing itself, it's not enough, I think, right? So I think you would need to promote it, market it somehow. Some people these days, you know, maybe publish on Medium and sub stack. Maybe it gets recommended by the platform. But other people might post on their personal websites and things like that and think

that's just it, right? So maybe tell tell us why we should do promotion of our, you know, writing and how can it be beneficial for us? So the obvious thing is that unless you do some kind of promotion, you're new, then nobody's going to ever read it because they wouldn't find it because we've got enough enough content being published every day. You might get lucky at London Hacker News if something's very interesting. But again, landing on Hacker News usually comes from some

kind of promotion. Somebody must have posted it in the first place. If it was you, it was also promotion. So first of all, there are multiple, like technically speaking, there are multiple ways you can publish A blog post. The easiest one, if it's just your technical company blog and it happens to be well maintained, high quality block anyway, for instance, is a great example of that. And then it's super easy because usually someone else takes care

of everything. You just need to provide the content and then it's edited, it's put out there, it's promoted by the company accounts and everywhere and then your job is done. If you decide to self publish, then obviously you also need to put in some more work.

Figure out things that Cynthia is expert about and she wrote all wrote all of her knowledge condensed into these chapters like how to make sure that people can actually find it, how to submit it to all kind of aggregators, Hacker News, lobsters and all the other kinds of blogs. There is also a whole bunch of companies that specializes in reposting not original content. So they are absolutely fine.

And actually it's their whole business to just take your blog, say somewhere in the footer that is actually not original. It comes from here, but repost it on their side. So there are, yeah, a whole bunch of tips and tricks how to make your blog was visible to the to the larger objects.

Right. I think those are some great tips, definitely, right. But what if let's say I am a person, I don't have any help maybe from the company, I don't have anyone with great networks. I'm just like a normal developer with small social media following probably right. So what tips would you give us? Would you recommend to actually start promoting you know our own content without you know such

help? I was first of all lucky enough that my first few articles were just piggybacked on on the on the technical blog post that that my company had. But still, especially after joining an even earlier stage startup, I broke my promise to never have a social media account. And I started using bug and Twitter for promoting just because everyone else was doing it because we really needed the company to get more broadly

known. But it does work exactly the same way with blog posts as well, your personal posts and well, to bootstrap yourself, assuming that you have some kind of niche that you, that you were writing about a certain language or I don't know, databases, web programming, whatever else. If you just start engaging with the community, even reviewing someone else's posts, commenting about something, then you start

getting those smaller circles. And then if you publish a post that is interesting to them, then hopefully some of them will share it and you'll wrote in your circle a little bit and you just go from there. Right. So yeah, definitely. I also learned like long form content, be it writing or maybe podcast, it's a kind of like a longer term thing, right? You cannot just expect other people to find the content that you produce, right? First of all, yeah, you need to produce more.

I guess. It's not just one time thing or so that you promote and you expect others to find you, but also, yeah, because starting from social media, even though you have small circles right in your social media, just post it. Hopefully somebody shares and you know, organically, you know, your posts can be found by others if let's say it's it's found to be useful for some people.

So I think 1 aspect that you mentioned in the very beginning and also in your book, right, you mentioned that blog posts could be a beginning of something that is bigger, right? So the most common aspects that normally people experience is being invited to write a book, just like in your case, right? Or maybe giving a talk in the conference, if let's say, the topic itself can be super useful for a particular conference.

So tell us this experience because I'm sure some, some of us also would like to know what, what benefits can it bring us just by writing, for example, blog post. Yeah. First of all, my experience was again, a little bit specific because I was also pretty much forced to go and present on my first first conference live.

But the thing with blog post is that first of all, that you, you kind of get noticed by people who look for either speakers or outdoors or whatever, because this is exactly, you're exactly the target. You're somebody who posted something potentially interesting so that you, you have something interesting to say about this topic.

So you're, you're a great fit for writing a book about it or speaking about it. The very nice thing about especially technical blog posts is that sometimes you can just not even improve it into a into a slide deck. You can just translate it into a slide deck for a 20 minute presentation and then present it online without changing too many

words really. Because if your structure is quite right and you've got this paragraphs, you've got some either benchmark results or maybe cold snippets, whatever else, those are slides. You can just often take them past this. You just, you just need to press the screenshot button a few times and you've got a whole deck. If this blog post was even moderately popular, then you know that there's interest in

the topic. So we can just you can just take it and present it in the other way because you're simply covering more people. Because some people prefer to just put your presentation in a in another browser tab and listen to it. Some prefer to attend personality to a conference and then talk to you after your talk. So you just take the same content. The hard part is done. You already already investigated everything. You know what you're talking about.

And you just present it in another way so that more people can access it, which is just yeah, that's just a good idea. It's you're already more than halfway through after the block is out. Yes. So I find if you got this opportunity being offered, you know, invited into a conference or writing a book that kind of like tells, oh, you have reached a certain different level, right. So from where you started in the beginning when you started writing the blog post?

So Sana, is there any other thing that you want to convey here? I know that we have covered and discussed a lot of things. Is there any other things that you want to give us listeners here about aspects of, you know, writing as a developer? Is there any other things that you want to cover today? Or I could just repeat great words from Ryan Country, who also quoted another person who quoted another person. These words are you're not

writing enough. And I love this quote because it's shortened to the point you should really consider sharing more because there's bounds to be a few things that you could have described and put out there so that people can learn from it. So just, yeah, I, I just encourage everyone to go and do it because there's no downside except spending some time. I love it, right. So definitely we are all we are all not writing enough, be it you know at work, be it personal thing.

Sometimes it could be your journal or diary, right? Just to distill your thoughts, right or things that you are going through. So I think definitely writing more is something very useful. So Sana, as we reach the end of

our conversation, I, I only have one last question that I'd like to ask you. I call this question the the three technical leadership wisdom. So if you can think, if you can think of them just like advice that you want to give to us. So anything that you want to share as part of your wisdom? Yeah.

So chronologically from my career, first one would be engaging, open source, it really based off the second one would be to write more and the third one to create a culture around you that encourages people to write more. Wow, lovely. So it's all about contribution, it's all about writing. So thank you for sharing those.

So for people who would love to maybe learn more from you right about this writing aspect or they want to follow your online resources, is there a place where they can find you online? The best place to learn about first of all the book and the continuation of the book is a web page to write that dot blog. This is kind of an aggregator where we go through new blog

posts every month. Like we pick a few that are popular and categorize them with those patterns and shortly summarize why they're interested. So this is the kind of blog post aggregator and promotion for the book that you can go and see. All right, thank you. I'll put that in the show notes. So thank you again for your time today, Sana. So I really love what you shared just now and especially the invitation for us to write more, I guess because we are all not writing enough.

Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity to first. It was great.