Writing For Developers: Takeaways and an Honest Review

14 Feb 2025 #books #writing

Like coding, writing is everywhere in software projects.

From README files to use cases to bug reports to blog posts. We developers spend as much time writing as coding, if not more.

Chances are if you’ve been stuck with an error for hours, some random guy’s blog post has saved your day.

Writing for Developers shows how to write those technical (or engineering) blog posts.

Here’s my honest review and key takeaways:

“You’re not writing enough” and other takeaways

#1. Technical blog posts don’t have to be boring.

They should have a balance between an interesting subject, a valuable lesson, and good packaging for the reader. And after reading your posts, your readers should leave with something learned.

#2. If you find a subject interesting, other people will find it too.

Write about anything you find interesting.

But if you’re writing for the first time and you’re not sure what to write about, remember 3 Ps:

1. what you’re passionate about
2. what you’re pained by
3. what you’re proud of

#3. We shouldn’t rely on AI to write our posts.

But, it doesn’t mean we can’t use it to critique or review our drafts.

Here are two prompts to critique our drafts:

1. “Are there any statements in this engineering blog post that do not seem adequately supported by facts?”
2. “Can you identify any parts of this article that seem less relevant to its main goal of [your goal]?”

My favorite lesson? “You’re not writing enough.” You can always write more.

My alternative “how to read this book”

Writing is not a subject you will learn from a single book.

It takes years to master it. And we, as developers, have a double challenge: putting words together and presenting complex subjects clearly.

If you’re new to writing, you will get more out of this book by reading the first two parts, especially chapters 4 and 5. They cover how to write and polish your first draft.

This book doesn’t answer where to write. It slightly covers how to do it in an appendix. If you’re writing for your company’s engineering blog, they likely have already sorted out those details. Hopefully.

Now if you’re not new to writing, let’s say you already have a blog and have published more than a dozen blog posts, you will get more out of this book by reading Part 3.

Part 3 covers 7 blog post patterns:

1. Bug Hunt
2. Rewrote it in X
3. How We Built it
4. Lessons Learned
5. Thoughts on Trends
6. Non-markety Product Perspectives
7. Benchmarks and Test results

Each chapter contains sample blog posts, a commentary on those posts, and an explanation of how to write each type of post.

That was my favorite part.

Definitely I’ve written some of those type of posts. But I didn’t think of them as patterns we could implement.

My final verdict? 3.8/5.