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.