Writing for Developers

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

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

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

• Pinpoint topics that make intriguing posts

• Apply popular blog post design patterns

• Rapidly plan, draft, and optimize blog posts

• Make your content clearer and more convincing to technical readers

• Tap AI for revision while avoiding misuses and abuses

• Increase the impact of all your technical communications

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

Foreword by Bryan Cantrill. Afterword by Scott Hanselman.

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

About the Technology

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

About the Book

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

What’s inside

• Rapidly plan, draft, and review your content

• Build on popular blog post design patterns

• Support your writing with AI

• Increase the impact of all your communications

About the Eeader

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

Table of Contents

Part 1- Fundamentals

1. Why write

2. What to write

3. Captivating readers

Part 2- Nailing the writing process

4. Creating your working draft

5. Optimizing your draft

6. Getting feedback

7. Ship it

Part 3- Applying blog post patterns

8. The “Bug Hunt” pattern

9. The “Rewrote It in X” pattern

10. The “How We Built It” pattern

11. The “Lessons Learned” pattern

12. The “Thoughts on Trends” pattern

13. The “Non-markety Product Perspectives” pattern

14. The “Benchmarks and Test Results” pattern

Part 4- Promotion, adaptation, and expansion

15. Getting attention

16. From blog post to conference talk

17. So you want to write a book

A. Publishing and writing resources

B. AI uses and abuses

About the Author

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

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