Writing for Developers: Blogs that get read

Piotr Sarna, a software engineer, and Cynthia Dunlop, who has been writing for and with developers for over twenty years, answer one question in “Writing for Developers”: how does a technical topic turn into a blog post that other developers actually read – and pass on?

The first part covers the why and the what: which topics carry an engineering blog, which excuses we invent for not writing, and how the opening paragraphs have to look so that readers stay.

The second part walks through the working process – from the rough draft to revising, gathering feedback, and shipping the post.

The third part takes up the most room: seven patterns for engineering blog posts – “The Bug Hunt,” “We Rewrote It in X,” “How We Built It,” “Lessons Learned,” “Thoughts on Trends,” “Non-markety Product Perspectives,” and “Benchmarks and Test Results.” Each pattern comes with a structure, real examples, and the mistakes that typically happen along the way. Once you know which pattern fits your topic, you no longer have to invent the structure of your post yourself.

The fourth part reaches beyond the single post: how a finished text finds its readers, and how a blog post becomes a conference talk. Tips from well-known bloggers run through the whole book – among them Jeff Atwood, Charity Majors, Simon Willison, and antirez. A dedicated section covers generative AI in blogging: the sensible uses and the abuses.

I recommend this book to every developer who writes about their work: on a company blog, on their own blog, or on the way to a first conference talk. Even after years of writing, you will find structure here for things you have been doing by instinct.

🎧 Suitable as an audiobook? No. The book lives on sample texts and checklists you look up rather than listen to.