⚡ In a hurry? Skip straight to the rules ⚡
Don't Make the Same Mistake I Did
I have plenty of regrets, and one of them is not starting to write my own content years ago. Better late than never, as they say, but still.
I want to make sure you don't make the same mistake. Every week I see more people joining this amazing community, and it reminds me how excited I was when I first signed up back in 2018. (If you're curious how I ended up here, I wrote about it in my previous article.)
Back then, I thought writing was only for seasoned veterans. I couldn't have been more wrong. I know plenty of engineers with years of experience who still can't write a single technical article. Not because they have nothing to say, but because they never tried.
Time to Take the Leap
Trust me, you don't need decades of experience. You're fine.
Your first article will probably feel tricky, awkward and hard. Speaking from experience, though, it gets so much easier after that. And your first one will always be special, no matter how good or bad it turns out. You might cringe at it in a year or two, but that's a special kind of cringe. It's proof of how far you've come a long way since then.
Not Sure What to Write About?
You don't need a groundbreaking idea. Some of the best first articles are simple:
- A bug that took you way too long to fix, and what finally solved it
- Something you learned this week that you wish you'd known earlier
- How you got into programming
- A small project you built, even if nobody uses it
- A concept that finally clicked for you, explained the way you wish someone had explained it to you
And so many other ideas that you can think of.
If it was interesting to you, it'll be interesting to someone else.
✍️ The Rules
Alright, I'm going to be your first reader.
👉 Write your first article on DEV. Any topic, any length. Short is perfectly fine.
👉 Drop the link in the comments.
👉 Optional: tell me what finally made you hit "Publish".
I'll read EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM and give you honest, thorough feedback. I promise! 🤝 I always deliver whatever I promise.
One small request: write it yourself. Use AI to check your grammar if you like, but the voice and the story should be yours. That's what makes a first article worth reading.
Already a Writer? You're Invited Too
If you've been writing for a while, drop a link to your very first article in the comments, or share one piece of advice you wish someone had given you before you published it. Nothing calms first-time nerves like seeing that everyone started somewhere.
The Hall of Fame Is Waiting
A few weeks ago, I asked you to share the article you're most proud of, and it turned into the DEV Hall of Fame: 65 authors, 65 masterpieces. If you start now, your work could earn a spot when I put together the next volume.
Let's get the journey started! 🚀
Let's stay connected!
Top comments (23)
@georgekobaidze Sir, you already know my first technical article but this one is latest:
A humbling reminder that passing tests can lie
I'm Not on the DEV Team. I Still Debugged Their Missing Badges From Public Code. (And My First Test Was Wrong.)
Have A Great Day!
Thanks for sharing, I'll read it! However this one's dedicated only to first articles and first-time writers. 🙏
No worries Sir. I'll be just glad for you to read it.
Have A Great Day!
A truly heartening gesture! One need not be an expert to share valuable knowledge. I sincerely admire your generosity in encouraging budding writers and offering them your time. Such kindness makes a community flourish. Much appreciated!
Thank you! I’m here doing what I can to help the community.🫡
cooking... in mind.
I appreciate this initiative.
Thank you!
The line that hit me: "Your first article will probably feel tricky, awkward and hard... but that's a special kind of cringe. It's proof of how far you've come."
I remember feeling exactly this way. When I started, I thought I needed to be a senior expert to write anything worth reading. I'd stare at a blank page and think, "Who am I to write a tutorial on this?"
The advice I wish I'd been given earlier is this: You don't need to be an expert. You just need to be one step ahead of the person reading it.
If you just figured out how a for loop works, write about that. The person who is still confused by it will learn way more from you than from a senior dev who forgot what it feels like to be a beginner. You don't have to be a guru; you just have to be a good guide for the stage you just passed.
I also love your rule about writing it yourself. AI can structure an article, but it can't feel the frustration of a bug that took three hours to fix. That human element is the whole reason people read blogs.
This is a great initiative, man. I'll be reading through the comments to support the new writers!
Thanks! I’m so looking forward to seeing what people come up with. Their ideas are especially interesting, cause they’re new to all this and their perspective is much different.
I love this. I wrote recently about whether the tech community is really as welcoming to beginners as we say it is, and this is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. It's one thing to encourage people to put themselves out there, but actually offering to read their work and give thoughtful feedback is something else entirely. That first bit of encouragement can mean so much to someone who's nervous about sharing their work. I really hope a bunch of new writers take you up on this.
The community is definitely welcoming. But I feel like we need to do a better job encouraging newcomers to start creating their own content.
I’m happy to contribute to it!✌️
This is such a great initiative! I still remember publishing my very first article, wondering if anyone would actually read it, and getting excited about every single view! 😊
I had the same experience, I got a handful of views and ~2 likes. And I was like: oh my goodness, someone's actually liked my post!😂
What a rookie I was.
I think some of the most valuable technical articles come from problems that didn't go as planned.
Take Google's SRE postmortem about a routine infrastructure decommissioning that went wrong. A retry after a partial failure, combined with an API treating an empty filter as no filter, ended up triggering disk erasure across satellite machines. That's a pretty serious failure caused by an assumption that probably looked harmless during development.
What makes a write-up like this valuable isn't just the final fix. It's explaining the chain of events, the assumptions behind the implementation, how the issue was investigated, and what changed to prevent it from happening again.
You don't need to publish groundbreaking research to write something worth reading. Sometimes documenting one difficult debugging session can save another developer hours of investigation.
💯
This is a great initiative! Many beginners hesitate to publish because they feel they need years of experience or a perfect topic, but sharing what you've learned is how you grow as a writer and developer. I especially appreciate your offer to give honest feedback. A supportive community like this can make that first step much easier. Looking forward to seeing what new writers share!
Thank you! And how about you? Are you gonna use this chance and write your first article?👀
By the way, this was my first article ever:
Understanding Your Audience as a Software Engineer
Well, this takes me back more than ten years.
kenwalger.com/blog/css/numeric-inp...
And wow, I had some typos and grammatical errors in there. 🤦♂️No editors, no AI to check things, just the ramblings of someone wanting to start a tech(ish) blog.
First on Dev.to: dev.to/kenwalger/indexing-in-mongodb
More typos and grammatical errors.
I've learned a lot over the years, not just in technology, but in the content generation and publication process.