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The Best Software Development Blogs

Karl L. Hughes — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Practicing a few key disciplines goes a long way toward building a successful career as a developer. Staying up to date with the latest coding trends is definitely one of them. And that’s where software development blogs and communities come in handy.

However, as a simple Google search on the term software development blog can prove, there are just a few resources out there. It’s easy to feel discouraged about where to even start reading.

Never fear, I’m here to help you wade in with Draft.dev’s guide to 30 of the best software development blogs on the web. Get ready to enhance your career and deepen your personal knowledge with informative, enriching articles for every discipline and every background.

For easy skimming and quick decision-making, I’ve rated each blog based on five different criteria:

Writing quality: the overall quality and readability of the content the blog normally produces
Consistency: how often the blog produces new content
Longevity: the length of time the blog has been around, which often indicates the trustworthiness and authority of its content
Technical depth: the level of technical detail you can expect to find on the blog
Broad usefulness: how many different interests, disciplines, and skill levels the blog appeals to

Let’s begin.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean might be the next great thing in the developer community. With their recent incorporation of Alligator.io and Scotch.io, their library is vast enough to fulfil the needs of every developer. They publish a truly staggering amount of content monthly, with great technical depth.

Writing quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 4
Technical depth: 5
Broad usefulness: 5
Overall score: 4.8

Smashing Magazine

Visually appealing for web developers of all backgrounds, Smashing Magazine consistently provides long, technical reads about topics like JavaScript, React and web design in general.

Writing quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 4
Technical depth: 4
Broad usefulness: 4
Overall score: 4.6

Stack Overflow Blog

Naturally, the most famous website for developer knowledge from all over the world has a blog, with simple, easy-to-understand guides on every type of topic for developers of all backgrounds.

Writing quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 3
Technical depth: 5
Broad usefulness: 5
Overall score: 4.6

CSS-Tricks

Don’t get misled by the name; CSS articles aren’t the only reason it’s worth a visit. CSS-Tricks is a great platform for all web-related technologies, publishing three to five new articles daily of great quality and technical depth. The site’s UX is extremely modern, complementing a rich collection of guides on web topics like Flexbox and SASS.

Writing quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 3
Technical depth: 5
Broad usefulness: 3
Overall score: 4.2

Level Up Coding

Written by select authors, this Medium blog shares great web technology content for all types of developers, with a consistent quality of writing and a very active community.

Writing quality: 4
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 3
Technical depth: 5
Broad usefulness: 4
Overall score: 4.2

Bits And Pieces

Two million developers tune in monthly to read about the web on Bits and Pieces. Join the blog and get daily content about your favorite JavaScript frameworks. Accessible for developers of all skill levels.

Writing quality: 4

Consistency: 5

Longevity: 4

Technical depth: 4

Broad usefulness: 4

Overall score: 4.2

Coding Horror

Jeff Atwood created this website in 2004, and he has described his blog as being a complete life-changer for him. The website, however, has also changed the life of thousands of coders from all over the world reading it. Making its quirkiness and humorous graphics its strong point.

Jeff hasn’t been publishing often in the last year, yet the website remains a gem for all passionate coders, especially those looking for all web development related topics presented in a fun, playful way.

Writing quality : 5

Consistency : 2

Longevity : 5

Technical depth : 5

Broad usefulness : 4

Overall score : 4.2

BetterProgramming

The most followed Medium publication about coding. BetterProgramming publishes more than fifteen articles a day of truly great quality, ranging across all technologies, for all developers. Its editors pay special attention to selecting the best authors based on their skills, with great attention on diversity between them.

Writing quality: 4

Consistency: 5

Longevity: 3

Technical depth: 5

Broad usefulness: 4

Overall score: 4.2

freeCodeCamp

freeCodeCamp made history as the most-followed Medium publication ever. They’ve since moved on their own website, with more than 6000 articles about any type of coding technology. A great site for beginners, and not only because of the quality of content, they offer a free software development curriculum. Pair the lessons with their articles to fast-track your learning.

Writing quality: 4

Consistency: 4

Longevity: 3

Technical depth: 5

Broad usefulness: 5

Overall score: 4.2

Tutorialspoint

Choose a coding language, and Tutorialspoint will have dozens of articles ready for you to pick from. Really one of the best linear resources for developers looking to acquire new skills.

Writing quality: 3

Consistency: 4

Longevity: 5

Technical depth: 4

Broad usefulness: 5

Overall score: 4.2

DEV.to

On Dev.to, you will find a community of more than half a million developers reading and sharing each other’s articles. It hosts thousands of articles, podcasts and Q&As related to any type of coding language, with new content added daily. Everybody can contribute whenever they want to this website, like in social media. This makes the platform very content-rich but also low in quality sometimes, as there is no checking on the published article’s quality.

The platform also offers a cool gamification system to reward contributors with badges and free gifts from their shop.

Writing quality: 3

Consistency: 5

Longevity: 3

Technical depth: 5

Broad usefulness: 5

Overall score: 4.2

Todd Motto

Google expert Todd Motto provides readers with deeply technical articles about the web’s most used frameworks, such as Angular and React. Unfortunately, the website isn’t that consistent when it comes to new content, but it’s still worth checking out.

Writing quality: 5

Consistency: 2

Longevity: 4

Technical depth: 5

Broad usefulness: 4

Overall score: 4

Robin Wieruch

Robin Wieruch’s followers are used to a collection of truly amazing articles about React every month. Easily learn everything you ever wanted to know about the library thanks to Wieruch’s straightforward, easy-to-understand writing style.

Writing quality: 5

Consistency: 3

Longevity: 4

Technical depth: 5

Broad usefulness: 2

Overall score: 3.8

Ray Wenderlich

A masterpiece when it comes to discussing mobile technologies, this blog publishes three to four deeply technical articles a week. With a special focus on Swift and Kotlin, this site allows free subscribers to download resources from select articles, making it a masterclass for students of mobile tech.

Writing quality: 5

Consistency: 3

Longevity: 3

Technical depth: 5

Broad usefulness: 3

Overall score: 3.8

SitePoint

Since 1999, SitePoint has been an excellent platform for web-based technology tutorials. With four to five highly researched articles published a week, topics range from JavaScript and PHP to Angular and React.

Writing quality: 5

Consistency: 3

Longevity: 5

Technical depth: 3

Broad usefulness: 3

Overall score: 3.8

Stack Abuse

Weekly articles about JavaScript, Java and Python are perfect for developers with some experience. Stack Abuse gets in-depth and can be complex for novices.

Writing quality: 5

Consistency: 3

Longevity: 3

Technical depth: 5

Broad usefulness: 3

Overall score: 3.8

LogRocket

LogRocket builds software for monitoring your frontend. Conveniently, they’ve created a blog with deeply technical articles and how-tos for improving application performance. Suggested for more experienced professionals.

Writing quality: 5

Consistency: 4

Longevity: 3

Technical depth: 5

Broad usefulness: 3

Overall score: 3.8

The Crazy Programmer

Providing weekly instructive articles about programming and industry, The Crazy Programmer offers a wide variety of tutorials, programs and interview practice for JavaScript, Android, C, C++, Java, .Net, PHP, SQL and PL/SQL. Suggested for both junior and senior developers.

Writing quality: 3

Consistency: 3

Longevity: 4

Technical depth: 4

Broad usefulness: 5

Overall score: 3.8

Towards Data Science

An extremely large Medium publication, Towards Data Science is focused on, well, data science, with a good amount of content related to coding. Best fit for people who are in the field of AI or machine learning, this site publishes great quality material daily.

Writing quality: 5

Consistency: 4

Longevity: 3

Technical depth: 5

Broad usefulness: 2

Overall score: 3.8

JavaScript In Plain English

This is the place to be for all developers passionate about JavaScript. Rapidly growing, JavaScript in Plain English offers daily education and inspiration for junior developers who want to master the language of the web.

Writing quality: 4

Consistency: 5

Longevity: 3

Technical depth: 5

Broad usefulness: 3

Overall score: 3.8

Simple Programmer

John Sonmez created this website in 2009 to share his experiences about how to land a coding job. And his efforts paid off: the community has grown into a great place to get career advice, even how to create your own online business. Articles are published daily, but only some of them are technical. The majority of the blog’s content still focuses on employment.

Writing quality: 4

Consistency: 5

Longevity: 3

Technical depth: 3

Broad usefulness: 3

Overall score: 3.6

A List Apart

This website hasn’t been publishing a lot lately, yet its collection of articles is still great for all the web developers out there with a passion for project management and creativity tools.

Writing quality: 5

Consistency: 3

Longevity: 4

Technical depth: 2

Broad usefulness: 4

Overall score: 3.6

Flavio Copes

The most astonishing thing about Flavio Copes is his consistency to publish new content every day. He writes short-format articles, kind of like pills of knowledge, on topics ranging across all languages, but particularly JavaScript. Check out this site for beginner how-to guides, as well as Flavio’s library of free ebooks.

Writing quality: 3

Consistency: 5

Longevity: 4

Technical depth: 3

Broad usefulness: 3

Overall score: 3.6

Hackr.io

I found Hackr.io to be particularly useful for those looking for career orientation. In fact, most of their articles are guides for interviews. Expect to find two or three new posts every month. If you want help deciding what to learn first, they offer a special section listing the best online tutorials chosen by the community for every technology you can think of.

Writing quality: 5

Consistency: 2

Longevity: 3

Technical depth: 5

Broad usefulness: 2

Overall score: 3.4

codeburst

Another Medium publication, codeburst publishes two to three articles a day, usually for web technologies like JavaScript and its frameworks. Occasionally, though, you can find true gems of career advice. Especially helpful for intermediate developers with a passion for JavaScript and related technologies.

Writing quality: 4

Consistency: 4

Longevity: 2

Technical depth: 3

Broad usefulness: 4

Overall score: 3.4

Codecademy

Codecademy is one of the best places online to start your career in coding. Their blog reflects that, with quality weekly content about interviews and landing a job as a developer.

Writing quality: 4

Consistency: 3

Longevity: 4

Technical depth: 2

Broad usefulness: 2

Overall score: 3.2

Kent Dodds

Kent Dodds’ site is a hidden gem for React lovers. His passion for the library is evident in every article — unfortunately, there aren’t that many, less than 200 as of today. Still, check out Dodds’ site for deeply technical content for all types of React developers.

Writing quality: 4

Consistency: 2

Longevity: 3

Technical depth: 5

Broad usefulness: 2

Overall score: 3.2

Hackernoon

Hackernoon is for people passionate about technology — they don’t only focus on coding, setting it apart from the rest of the blogs in this guide. It also covers startups, decentralization and gaming. A great place for techies, but a little distracting for developers looking for specific tutorials.

Writing quality: 3

Consistency: 4

Longevity: 4

Technical depth: 2

Broad usefulness: 3

Overall score: 3.2

David Walsh

Tech guru David Walsh, who works for Mozilla, writes new articles about web development every week. On his blog, you will enjoy a variety of contents ranging from JavaScript to its frameworks. Or, if you prefer, an amazing series of articles regarding career advice from an absolute master like David.

Writing quality: 4

Consistency: 2

Longevity: 4

Technical depth: 4

Broad usefulness: 3

Overall score: 3.2

Code Like A Girl

A community built by women to inspire other women to join the tech world and help create its future. Their Medium blog publishes great content daily, especially related to career advice for women in tech.

Writing quality: 4

Consistency: 3

Longevity: 3

Technical depth: 2

Broad usefulness: 3

Overall score: 3

Do you have a favorite software development blog that I didn’t include in this list? Submit your suggestions here!

The Best Golang Blogs

Karl L. Hughes — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 19:18:47 +0000

Go recently turned eleven, so you can imagine how much the language and its ecosystem have evolved through the years. A strongly typed language, it’s become increasingly popular with its garbage collection and concurrency support. It’s massively performant, scalable, and resource-use efficient. Small wonder that Go is applied across a multitude of areas these days, including web applications, microservices, cloud computing, web servers, and other systems/tools.

A good way to stay on top of the constant changes to the language, its tools, and the community is to check out some of the blogs that specifically cover Go. In this article, we’ll look at blogs written by Go users, contributors, and educators about the various ways they are making use of the language.

1. A Journey With Go

A Journey with Go is a fairly new blog, with its first post in 2019. It tends to stick with a concept over a series of posts explaining it in detail. Interesting series you can find on the blog cover garbage collection, the compiler, and many more. It is written by Vincent Blanchon and is hosted on Medium.

Writing Quality: 4
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 3
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 5

2. Applied Go

Applied Go claims to “go beyond the Go tutorials.” In addition to its course on mastering Go, the site covers topics such asalgorithms and data structures, concurrent programming, distributed computing, patterns and paradigms, among many others. You can also find screencasts that complement the posts. It’s written and maintained by Christoph Berger.

Writing Quality: 4
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 4

3. Ardan Labs’ Blog

Ardan Labs is a company that provides software development, consulting, & training to companies that use Go in their products. They’ve worked with a number of Fortune 500 companies that use Go. Their blog covers Go topics in depth and explains fundamental Go concepts. Some interesting series on their blog that might be worth exploring cover Generics and Modules.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

4. Dave Cheney’s Blog

Dave Cheney is a Go project member and contributor. He’s well-known in the community and often speaks at Go conferences and events. His blog covers a lot about Go, but also discusses software design and other topics. Start exploring in the handy section about Practical Go.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

5. DEV’s Go Tag

DEV is a software developer community where individuals produce content, network, and collaborate. Anyone can post their written, audio, or visual content on DEV, and developers can tag their content for other developers to follow. As of this writing, there are about 3600 posts under the Go tag, ranging across tutorials, opinion pieces, concept breakdowns, and people documenting their experiences. It’s an amazing place to learn what other Go developers are working on and how they’re using Go in the products they build.

Writing Quality: 4
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 4

6. Digital Ocean’s Go Series

The DigitalOcean Community is a place for developers to share and teach one another. Not only do they produce a host of tutorials that cover Digital Ocean’s own products, the site also publishes content about other technologies and languages. For example, their ongoing series about coding in Go explains a lot of fundamentals, like error handling, and breaks down how to do a host of things with Go, like setting up a local programming environment on Ubuntu.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 3
Broad Usefulness: 4

7. Eli Bendersky’s Blog

Eli Bendersky is an open-source contributor who’s contributed to the Go language and some of its tools. His blog publishes technical, programming-related content on a range of topics and is rather active; the Go tag has fifteen posts from this year alone. He recently did an educational three-part series about embedding in Go and a four-part series about implementing the Raft algorithm in Go.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

8. Go By Example

Go by Example is a self-described “hands-on introduction to Go using annotated example programs.” It is not a blog per se—it’s not regularly updated with new content—but it is a web resource dedicated to simply explaining concepts in Go. It is updated as the Go language evolves and new releases are launched. It’s written and maintained by Mark McGranaghan, who has led engineering teams at Stripe and Heroku.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 2
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 5

9. Go Web Examples

Inspired by Go By Example, Philipp Tanlak created Go Web Examples to provide “easy-to-understand code snippets on how to do web development” in Go. The site’s tutorials and posts are clean and detailed and aimed specifically at Go web developers. A lot of web programming basics are covered, including middleware, WebSockets, sessions, and working with databases. Go Web Examples also provides a video course, some for free. Check out the series about how to build a Reddit clone with Go.

Writing Quality: 3
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 3
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 5

10. Go’s Articles Wiki

The articles section of the Go Github wiki lists a wide range of articles curated by the Go community. They cover topics ranging from security, cross platform development, testing, containers and Docker, among others. The section is updated regularly with new posts from a variety of authors and also includes articles in other languages, like Korean and Japanese.

Writing Quality: 4
Consistency: 3
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

11. Golang Bot

The GolangBot Blog, written by Naveen Ramanathan, offers Go tutorials that emphasize simplicity and offer lots of code samples. Its Learn Golang series is a good place to start for detailed coverage of Go basics. The most recent posts include a comprehensive series about how to use the MySQL database and WebAssembly with Go. You can also sign up for a jobs newsletter curated by the blog.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 5
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

12. Golang Programs

Golang Programs exhaustively covers the essentials of Go. Their posts contain helpful solutions to common problems in Go basics as well as more advanced tutorials and concept explanations, all with detailed code, as seen in their data structures and algorithms series.

Writing Quality: 3
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 3
Technical Depth: 3
Broad Usefulness: 5

13. GolangCode

GolangCode publishes how-to guides, specifically providing “quick answers to those everyday code problems, ones you know deep down but just require a quick Google anyway.” Its posts detail solutions for working with HTTP, APIs, file handling, using Goroutines, encoding, type conversions, and so much more. GolangCode is written by Edd Turtle.

Writing Quality: 4
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 2
Technical Depth: 3
Broad Usefulness: 5

14. Gopher Academy Blog

Gopher Academy is a community organization focused on promoting Go. They also produce Gophercon, the annual Go conference in North America. Their blog publishes news about the conference, as well as a wide range of topics relevant to Go. You can also find links to their Youtube channel, for videos of previous Gophercons.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 3
Longevity: 5
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

15. Gopher Guides

Gopher Guides provides Go consultation, training, support, and audit services for companies that use Go in their products. Although the blog only has a few posts, they do a good job sharing their knowledge and experience.

Writing Quality: 3
Consistency: 3
Longevity: 3
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 4

16. Hashnode’s Go Tag

Similar to DEV, Hashnode is a developer community that provides a platform for publishing free content. The community of almost 12,000 developers contribute all sorts of Go tutorials and articles to the tag, ranging from beginner-level posts to more advanced topics.

Writing Quality: 4
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 4

17. Ilija Eftimov’s Blog

Ilija Eftimov is a senior software engineer at Scribd, which uses Go. The most recent posts on his blog skew toward Go, specifically around testing. His tutorials are thorough and interesting, explaining how to accomplish goals with clear code examples. He also allows his readers to suggest topics to write about.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 5
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

18. ITNEXT’s Blog

ITNEXT is a knowledge-sharing platform for IT and software developers. They hold monthly meetups and summits where developers can pass on their expertise and experiences with technologies they use. ITNEXT also runs a Medium publication that allows developers to publish content about their favorite technologies, including multiple posts on Go.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

19. Just For Func

Just for Func is a blog with an accompanying Youtube channel. It’s run by Francesc Campoy, an engineering manager at Apple and a former developer advocate for Go at Google. Although the Medium blog has not been updated with new posts in a while, the YouTube version of the blog is active and contains very useful and fun videos focusing solely on Go. His introduction to SemVer, modules, and migration to modules is particularly insightful.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 3
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

20. Learn The Go Programming Language

This blog is just what it says on the tin, guiding you through real-world problems using Go. Posts like “Streaming IO in Go” and “Let’s Make an NTP Client in Go” are great examples. The author, Vladimir Vivien, hasn’t posted here in a while, but these posts and others he’s written on Medium are very insightful. He is also the author of Learn Go Programming.

Writing Quality: 4
Consistency: 2
Longevity: 3
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 4

21. Official Go Blog

The team that develops Go uses their blog to make announcements about what they’re working on, as well as providing updates on new features, tools, releases, and news about the community. A number of their posts go in-depth, like their series dedicated to Go modules.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 5
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

22. Russ Cox’s Blog

Russ Cox is a principal engineer at Go and leads the team that develops it. While he’s written a number of posts on the official Go blog, his own blog tends to focus on thoughts and proposals he has on Go. His posts tend to be extremely detailed and delve into the nitty-gritty of Go concepts. In fact, the official Go blog often links back to his blog for concepts that need more explanation.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 3
Longevity: 5
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

23. Tit Petric’s Blog

Tit Petric has authored a number of books on Go, focusing on how to use it well in a number of applications. His blog covers topics such as performance optimization, problem solving, high traffic, high availability, virtualization, and Docker, all with meticulous examples.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 5
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

24. Tutorial Edge

Tutorial Edge posts all kinds of tutorials for computer science, frontend frameworks, web and cloud development, programming languages, and so on. Its Go section is substantial, and the posts range from beginner-friendly to more advanced, all of them well cataloged and categorized. A recent post covers getting started with functions in Go for WebAssembly. It’s maintained by Elliot Forbes.

Writing Quality: 3
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 3
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

25. Wandering Thoughts’ Go Topic

Chris Siebenmann works in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Although his blog, Wandering Thoughts, covers a breadth of topics, a number of his most recent posts focus on Go how-to’s and his thoughts on the language.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 3
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 4

Conclusion

Keeping up with Go blogs is a smart way to stay exposed to how others are using Go to solve problems. There is so much Go content out there, and it’s not just limited to blogs; more and more people are turning to video and audio to share their Go content, not to mention all the Go forums and newsletters that are available.

There’s always something new to learn about Go, and better or more interesting ways to work with it are always popping up. If you know of other Go blogs we should include in this list, submit them here.

The 3 Questions You Should Ask Before Starting a Technical Blog

Karl L. Hughes — Sun, 19 Jul 2020 17:34:39 +0000

The best technical blogs have a clear audience and defined goals. I originally published this on Draft Academy, but it's also part of my free 7-day email course on building a better technical blog.

If you're thinking about starting a technical blog, I hope this helps get you started:

Q1: Why are you writing?

“I don’t know why I started writing. I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored, or failures at something else.” - Cormac McCarthy

Not every technical blog’s goals are the same, but the good ones know why they exist. Here are a few legitimate reasons you might start a blog:

Raise awareness - For new companies, letting people know what you do and what problems you solve is a good starting point. The tricky part is doing that while creating valuable, interesting content.
Supplement documentation - A blog can be a great place to host a repository of public knowledge in the form of sample apps, use cases, and best practices.
Build an audience - Some blogs act as the top of the marketing team's funnel. These blogs usually seek to capture leads through an email or social signup.
Thought leadership - Consultants and agencies are especially motivated to establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry.
Move prospects through your funnel - Content isn’t just for the top of the funnel. Your blog can support nurturing campaigns that turn leads into customers.
Search engine optimization (SEO) - Once your blog has been around for a while, it may start to rank for keywords on Google. If you want to maximize your traffic from search engines, a blog is critical.

There are plenty of marketing and communication channels available, so don't feel like you have to have a blog. If you do create one, set a clear goal before you start investing in it.

Q2: Who are you writing for?

“You get what you focus on. Focus on nothing, and you won’t get much.” - Seth Godin

Blogs are often aimed at your target customers, but sometimes they are written for stakeholders or influencers. Here are some audiences you might reach with a technical blog:

Software engineers - Many software companies use a bottoms-up approach in their blog. Individual contributors may not have purchasing power, but they often have a strong influence over the people who do.
Middle managers - Managers likely have purchasing power, but there aren't as many of them, and they may not read as much technical content anymore.
Executives and directors - The most valuable group is often the hardest to reach. Executives’ priorities vary, so you’ll have to be okay with small traffic numbers and highly focused content.
Startup technologists - Startups can be great customers because they make decisions fast, and the executives are often still very close to the code. Reaching them will require a mix of content types.

The more specific you can be about your audience, the better you'll be able to focus your efforts to reach them. Learn about them: where do they hang out online? What problems do they have? What newsletters or social medial sites do they use?

A clearly defined audience will go miles towards making your blog better.

Q3: What kind of content will you write?

“If you think something is clever and sophisticated, beware - it is probably self-indulgence.” - Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

Your content should be unique, but it shouldn’t surprise your audience. Most successful blogs choose 2-3 standard "formats" and publish them consistently. Here are the most common formats I see on software engineering blogs:

Tutorials - These step-by-step walkthroughs show readers how to build something or illustrate a specific use-case for your product. They provide a lot of value to engineers who are using your tool or related technologies.
Roundups - Listacles get a bad wrap, but high-quality curation is still valuable when done right. Roundups bring together a wealth of information to help your readers make decisions.
Case Studies - Like tutorials, case studies can illustrate a use-case for your product, but they tend to be more focused on the outcomes than the process. Case studies can also come off as a bit “salesy” if you're not careful.
Features - Borrowing the word from journalism, a “feature” dives deep into something of interest to your audience. For example, you might introduce a new feature, highlight a team member, or do a technical teardown of part of your codebase.
Q&As - Interviews with team members, customers, and influencers in the industry can be a great way to focus your blog’s lense outwards and help you piggyback off your interviewee's audience.
Comparisons - Comparisons help readers decide between competing options. A good comparison post will offer an objective conclusion for which option is best under which circumstance.
Opinion Pieces - Personal experiences and observations help establish you as a thought leader. These pieces are valuable when done well, but require a bit of name recognition to pull them off.

Think you're ready to start a technical blog? Have some clear targets and an audience defined? Next, you have to pick a blogging platform. If you get stuck, email me sometime (karl@draft.dev). I'd love to help.