[HN Gopher] Blog Writing for Developers (2023)
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       Blog Writing for Developers (2023)
        
       Author : mooreds
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2024-11-04 20:01 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (rmoff.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (rmoff.net)
        
       | Syonyk wrote:
       | > _The second reason that I'll write is to learn about something.
       | It's one thing to hand-wave one's way through a presentation.
       | It's another to commit pen to paper (well, bytes to disk) and
       | explain something. Quite often I'll realise that there's a gap--
       | or gaps--in my knowledge that I need to explore first before I
       | can properly write about something, and that's the very reason
       | that I do it._
       | 
       | This is a very good reason to write - I've learned about a ton of
       | topics over the years at depths I wouldn't have bothered with if
       | I weren't going to write blogposts about it. I really didn't
       | _need_ to spend a year chewing through other people 's PhD work
       | to understand some of the quirks of lead acid battery behavior I
       | was seeing years back (Steve on IRC's description covered the
       | details well enough to work around it), but if I was going to
       | write it up[0], I wanted to actually _understand_ it. And that
       | took time.
       | 
       | But it misses one of the most important reasons I write: To force
       | myself to finish projects and document things, so I can fully
       | offload it from my brain.
       | 
       | I'm very prone to "90% done, eh, good enough, I'll finish it
       | later..." sort of projects, and they take up a lot of mental
       | space because I still have to (or, at least, _try_ to...)
       | remember state on the project. Before I write about something, I
       | want it fully done, and then as part of writing it up, I trust
       | myself to document anything weird, any odd findings, etc. Once I
       | 've done _that,_ then I can entirely forget the details of the
       | project, teardown, or whatever, knowing that if I need to do it
       | again, I can go reference my old writeup and I 'll know what I
       | need to do!
       | 
       | Once written, I can just clear the brain-space out, and not worry
       | about forgetting about it, because it's been written up, by me,
       | in my style.
       | 
       | Also, copy editors and reviewers start to sound more like
       | professional writing than "blogging," at least to me.
       | 
       | [0]: https://www.sevarg.net/2018/04/08/off-grid-rv-lead-acid-
       | main...
        
         | richardwhiuk wrote:
         | As a reader, people writing to learn about something irritates
         | me when it's not clearly flagged that the writer has almost
         | zero experience using the thing they are writing about.
         | 
         | There's so many articles in tech where the writer probably has
         | less experience with something than literally anyone who will
         | read their post, and it means there's effectively a content
         | farm of what a new software engineer will learn in their first
         | few months (if not years) on the job, written by software
         | engineers in their first few months, with effectively no net
         | information.
        
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       (page generated 2024-11-04 23:00 UTC)