#221 - Writing for Developers: How to Create Content People Read and Share - Piotr Sarna

[00:01:20] Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another new episode of the Tech Lead Journal 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.

Piotr Sarna: Thanks for inviting me. And hello everyone.

[00:02:06] Career Turning Points

Henry Suryawirawan: Uh, Sarna. I always love to invite my guests first to share about maybe yourself by sharing any career turning points that you think we all can learn from you.

Piotr Sarna: Sure. Uh, 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 ScyllaDB, which was, uh, the super high quality open source product. And that’s where I learned really a lot.

And my latest turning point was joining the AI hype, which is hopefully not just, uh, not just a hype, but actually a new era, which is from a year ago. So these are, yeah, I actually have at least three of those points, but those are the ones that stand out.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I saw from your profile, you are also active in open source, right? You are active as a maintainer in the libSQL and ScyllaDB, right? So tell us how do you actually juggle your full-time job, maybe with your open source maintainer contributions?

Piotr Sarna: Oh, that’s very easy, because, uh, 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, uh, there’s only 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.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. And maybe a little bit of the AI hype that you mentioned, just sharing what are you up to these days, right? So what kind of problems are you solving?

Piotr Sarna: So last year, last year and a month, I guess, I joined poolside, which is one of the companies that works on those largest large language models. I am not sure how much I can spill before we release a product because it’s under, you know, 19 layers of NDAs. But we are working to provide, well, hopefully state of the art best models for programming, for helping people to program. So think a pair programmer that is really smart.

Henry Suryawirawan: Alright, 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 see poolside as well as one of the solutions.

Piotr Sarna: Oh, definitely. Yeah.

[00:04:30] The Challenge of Writing for Developers

Henry Suryawirawan: 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 posts, newsletter. It could be even like other types of contents. But somehow we 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?

Piotr Sarna: So 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. ’ Cause that’s the, that that’s the first bit. That they’re 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 educational, would be to have a writing culture somehow included in the company they work at. Cause that uh, is what bootstrapped me and quite a few of my colleagues as well. So that would be, yeah, that would be the very good starting point because most engineers are not alone. They work at some kind of company, be it startup or corporation. But any kind of company would, it could have a writing culture.

[00:06:08] The Importance of Writing Culture

Henry Suryawirawan: I find it interesting when you mention 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, right, 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.

Piotr Sarna: 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 put something out, it’s usually very interesting. And it, I think it’s still, maybe it 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 allured to apply to Netflix if they see an interesting problem, for instance. So for from company side, I think it’s, uh, beneficial even just for hiring purposes to have an engineering blog. 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 side, well, there are so many advantages for you as an author. One of the advantages is that you need to kind of understand what you implemented to write about it. So it clarifies, uh, what you create. Sometimes you can even find a bug after trying to explain something and figure out that there’s a corner case 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 the 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, onsite meetups, all kinds of things. So yeah, there are endless opportunities if you, after you start writing and get some kind of recognition, cause some people are bound to read it.

[00:08:36] Piotr’s Journey to Writing Books

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So maybe can you also share your personal experience, right? Because I saw that you come from a technical background, right? And all these super technical coding experience, up to you writing this book, right? Because writing this book itself is like one implementation of writing for developers, right? So tell us your personal journey, how do you end up writing this book?

Piotr Sarna: So, uh, this particular book is a continuation of previous book that I also co-authored with three other people this time. It all started at ScyllaDB, 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. Very natural after you spend some time working at ScyllaDB 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 ScyllaDB also organized the conference. It was back then called ScyllaDB Summit. Now it diverges into a few online conferences. Then it was on an onsite conference in San Francisco, I also spoke about one of the topics from my blog posts. So that was another thing. And another pretty much result of me writing the blog post as well.

And then after a few years, I got approached by a publisher. I think after releasing one of the blog posts that got mildly popular, so it was also directly, caused by the, by me blogging, and he asked me if I am interested in writing a book about ScyllaDB. I 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, my co-author of this latest book, got an idea that we could write a more generic book about database performance based on ScyllaDB. That 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.

[00:11:19] The Impact of Writing on Engineering Culture

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, very interesting, right? I’m actually intrigued when you mentioned ScyllaDB actually kind of like forced everyone to write, right? I understand, you know, just now 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 ScyllaDB?

Piotr Sarna: Yes, from many angles. Uh. Some of it is just, uh, actually finding potential bugs and corner cases. When you try to explain something and examples, and you see that you obviously missed something, it might come up in a review or you might just find it out yourself. Kind of like rubber duck debugging but on text. Another thing is that this is a knowledge base, and we often just have people read a blog post about some feature instead of trying to point them specifically to code, to bootstrap them on 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. Uh, it’s one of our categories in the book, but the important thing about that is preparing benchmarks for 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 now look at another tool to benchmark your own code. And with benchmarks, the situation is very tough and blogging it is a hard category, because you’re going to get accused of biasing the benchmarks in your favor. It’ll 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.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, so I can understand that when you write a lot of things, right, the knowledge best 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.

[00:13:39] How to Overcome Common Excuses for Not Writing

Henry Suryawirawan: 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 these kind of like common excuses for people who do not love writing at all?

Piotr Sarna: First of all, if somebody 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 costs. 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 before 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 realized that it wasn’t really bad. It was just writing text instead of code and publishing it. And uh, 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 uh, care that much. But I remember my colleagues having issues with was that if they aren’t native English speakers, they wondered if grammar mistakes would be an issue and they would be ashamed and they put something not perfect in there.

There are at least two ways to debunk this excuse. One 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, uh, a good rule of thumb is that if online comments about your article only mention some grammar mistakes, then it means that the technical part was flawless. So congratulations! People would always love to get only this kind of feedback on things that they write.

Henry Suryawirawan: Very interesting perspective, right? So people nitpick about your grammar aspect of the writing, so that means your kind of like the technical aspect is flawless. So I like that one.

So also you mentioned like a 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. So you’re just inexperienced about it. So having other people reading, criticizing your writings, I think, is similar, right, when you contribute to open source.

[00:16:32] Finding The First Blog Post Topic

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think, let’s say, people are interested so they wanna write their first blog posts. 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 blogs already available online. So how do you help us to actually find our first blog post topic?

Piotr Sarna: The 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’s uninteresting, because a 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 technical 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.

Okay. 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 tens and hundreds of blog posts about the same topic. So, uh, it’s not like the first person called dibs 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 a language, trying something out that that matters and that makes, yeah, that produces this unique information that you can put in a post. And it really, and it’ll be interesting to someone.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, so 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, right? It could be beginners content, you know, expert content, like more and 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 kind 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 wanna say something?

Piotr Sarna: No, no, I just, I just agree that definitely. And one more thing I could add is that technical blog posts, out of all categories of blog posts, go out of date extremely fast. It’s both dying hyperlinks and code snippets 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 scrape 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 inherently more up to date, because it was released yesterday.

Henry Suryawirawan: 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 you just couldn’t compile or their SDK changed dramatically. So I think that’s a very good pointer as well. So yeah, just don’t be afraid to start writing, uh, 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 thoughts from you.

[00:20:32] Tips on How to Start Writing

Henry Suryawirawan: So writing itself, many people think, you know, it’s, uh, 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.

Piotr Sarna: There are multiple, uh, approaches and until you need to just find something that works for you, personally. Cynthia is an expert in forcing people to outline things and kickstart their writing process. Two approaches that are good to try out are as follows. The first one is to just start with writing the headers of the paragraphs that aren’t there yet. Like what would you like to add? Like what are your main points of the post? And then just fill them one by one. Not, 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, uh, 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 the 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. But the way you end up with something structured depends how your brain works. So it might be better to start with the structure itself, might be better to just write two unstructured pages and then figure them out.

[00:22:19] The Importance of Goal and Perspective in Writing a Draft

Henry Suryawirawan: 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? You 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 the writing, right? Which is to emphasize on the goal, like finding out what is the goal of your, the writing, right? And then the second aspect is why do you think your perspective is actually interesting for this particular blog posts, right, or writing. So tell us why these two aspects are really important when you come up with your writing.

Piotr Sarna: So as for getting the draft, yeah, I mean creating the draft and, uh, stating the goal. Yeah, it depends very much on what your goal is. So if you know what the goal is, then you can pick what process would work best for you.

I mean, it’s good if you consider who is going to, who in an ideal world would be the reader of your post? Because it might be that, uh, you just want to write it for yourself or for your future self like kind of a personal diary. Or maybe you want the broad public to know about your specific approaches.

Maybe you, you’re targeting a 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 for whatever reason.

One very specific goal that lots, uh, lots of writers do have in mind one way or another is optimized specifically for front page Hacker News. So this is something you should also consider, whether you do want it to land there, or maybe on the 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 then you can know how to structure your blog post to fit.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So I think for some people they love, uh, you know, ended up in the Hacker News or maybe some Reddit sub post, or whatever that is. So I think, uh, 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, right? Be it the topics, be it the structure, be it 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 advanced all in one blog post, I guess.

[00:24:55] The Use of AI in Writing

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think talking about writing these days, it’s inevitable, people will use AI in some form or shape to actually help them writing or 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?

Piotr Sarna: 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 an 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, uh, not even covering the topic that it was supposed to cover. I, yeah, everyone’s seen GPT generated articles 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 hypothetical that I would like to write. Maybe, we’ll end up there one day. Right now, it definitely isn’t the case.

But what models, today, I think, in the future, probably even more, what they’re really great at, is something a little different, which is using them as reviewers more or less. And there are also many ways that you can, uh, use AI to help you make a better blog post from very simple use cases that are pretty much glorified Google search is, for instance, uh, 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, LLMs are great at that be cause they can just suggest how to rephrase a single sentence. So that’s, so that it’s, you know that something’s off. You don’t know how to fix it. But hopefully if you see it generated, then you’ll know.

Another thing is that they are quite good at judging your post. For instance, you can ask an LLM to point out three 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. But sometimes it really is that kind of ‘wow’ moment. Oh, 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 it point out where does this come from? I don’t understand what’s the source of this information. So it’s also, uh, great for that. Then there are also simple things. You can also, you can also use AI for more context or grammar checks. 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 used it, and it will only get better.

Henry Suryawirawan: Very interesting, uh, 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 it depends on your goal especially, right? So if you just wanna produce something and post something under your name, I think maybe that’s a different thing. But let’s say you wanna 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 by giving feedback, reviewing, 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 wanna put to the readers, right? So I think, um, definitely very, very useful.

[00:29:01] AI Prompts to Improve Your Writing

Henry Suryawirawan: 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, um, 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?

Piotr Sarna: So I would, uh, 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 aren’t explained, that their source is unknown. So maybe it’s useful to provide this source and to run all the articles of yours with this. And you might be, uh, really surprised that it pointed out something quite important and you should just go and update your old post. Because something in there was something you assumed because you have some kind of industry knowledge or maybe knowledge internal to the company that was obvious to you, but it wasn’t obvious to the model. It didn’t work with you at this company, obviously.

[00:30:14] The Best LLM Model for Writing

Henry Suryawirawan: So maybe I know this can quickly get outdated. Is there also from your experience, right, so which LLM model or which tool that you think are kind of like maybe good enough for helping us, writers, to write something?

Piotr Sarna: The easiest answer, which I use, is “all”. It’s best to just, uh, spin up everything that you have access to and just ask the same, uh, question, the same list of things to go through, because the responses vary. And often it’s, there is no clear winner, at least, well, we checked last year and LLMs are improving daily. But, uh, often, it was the case that one of the models answered great about pointing out unclear sentences, but totally hallucinated, for instance, logical errors and contradictions, but while the other shined at 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, uh, you can just combine everything into a very high quality review. Especially that it’s not a problem if the review is downright false, because then you just discard it. You can just judge 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.

Henry Suryawirawan: 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 could suggest, right? So I think it’s still the same case, I guess, as you mentioned.

[00:31:53] The Best Workflow Working with AI

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think one other aspect working with AI, right, especially writing, you know, maybe a blog post or 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?

Piotr Sarna: So my answer might have been different last year when we released, but now the context window of all these models is large enough to fit your whole post. So you can iterate and it’s the, usually the paragraphs should be quite self-contained or at least progressively make some sense, so that next paragraph doesn’t depend on something from the future, which you can also ask LLM to check. By the way, it’s quite, it’s quite good at that.

I would much rather just write the whole thing and then go through the review, but that’s just how I work. On the other hand, if you are stuck writing and you have this writer’s block 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 touch upon next? Not actual content, but the idea, the suggestion. What would be a good continuation of this thing, because I’m stuck.

Henry Suryawirawan: 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, okay, maybe you can talk about A, B, C, D. And maybe from there we can start picking up our so-called flow, right?

[00:33:41] Blog Post Pattern: Bug Hunt

Henry Suryawirawan: So in your book, you also covered these 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 favorites that maybe you can share to us here. And why are they good to start with?

Piotr Sarna: 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, the blogosphere, y ou can’t help but qualify everything you see, uh, subconsciously and, uh, recognize this, that, oh, this is, this is “Bug Hunt”.

There are some patterns, there are some blog posts that don’t fit well into the patterns that we listed. We just, uh, picked some that, uh, we thought together cover most of the, most of the content out there. Uh, Bug hunt is the first pattern we explained, and it’s also my favorite because, uh, just because most of my favorite blog posts happen to be from this category.

So, uh, I can talk about this one and this one first. Uh, It’s quite self descriptive, but, uh, bug hunt is about, uh, it’s a post that explains, uh, how somebody looked for a bug in the code. Uh, it’s usually structured uh. 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 uh, 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, like, uh, 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, uh, works. And then whenever in the future you see a similar issue, it’s easy to just remember that you read a 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 path, the same investigation. Maybe not, but maybe it was a different issue that was also kind of described in there.

This is, this is why it’s my , uh. favorite pattern because it’s deeply educational, , uh, almost exclusively. It’s, uh, you always, uh, gain some unique knowledge. After reading uh, this kind of blog post.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, so I could remember sometimes when I face a particular challenging bug, so to speak, right? So maybe most likely it’s the external related bug, 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 bug hunt blog post is super useful. Uh, it’s kind of like save, uh, saving your day, right? So I think bug hunt could be one, uh, pattern that you actually explore to, uh, write something that is interesting for people to learn. And it’s like what you mentioned, right, is super educative, uh, when other people also face the same bug.

[00:37:16] Blog Post Pattern: Thoughts on Trends

Henry Suryawirawan: 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, maybe AI replacing developers or maybe the new super cool, uh, model that just got released, right? So, um, is this something that also people, um, I, I don’t know. 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? Um, so tell us maybe from your perspective, um, how, how effective this kind of post is?

Piotr Sarna: First of all, this, uh, is maybe a tiny bit depressing, but it also would be motivating. But the fact is that, uh, thoughts on trends, the pattern that we, that’s how we called it, uh, is, uh, and kind of an expert level pattern that you need to, uh, need to advance to after writing blog posts from, from other categories because, uh, the sad truth is that, uh, if you, as a new author write, uh, your thoughts on some topic, there’s a very high chance nobody cares at all, , uh, unless you’re even 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, uh, about a certain topic. But if you, uh, if it’s, if it’s your first steps, there’s, uh, 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, uh, So this is, uh, this is something that we recommend not as a first thing to pick when, when writing. Because even, uh, our examples that we went through are pretty much only from well established bloggers that you already recognize, and often it’s their name, and, uh, uh, uh, their name combined with the title that makes people actually read it. Not just the title, because the title is already hyped. So, uh, so yeah, this is, uh, this is an interesting observation, but this is not a beginner friendly pattern. But it, uh, it is interesting, uh, to, uh, because usually those bloggers are, already experienced, so they’re also good at condensing knowledge into a few minutes of reading.

Uh, And also, uh, you can, you can see that these patterns, uh. have, uh, like naturally become a series, for instance, that somebody tried out a language, and then five years later they write a continuation of this story going over all of the new features and so on. So, uh, it is very nice to just go on and read for half a day about the whole story starting from 1996 to today.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. Wow! I think that that’s very unique insight, right? So I, I thought that you could, uh, actually just cover any trend, but I think it’s more like an advanced, uh, uh, kind of like, uh, pattern, right? So maybe you should start with some other patterns first. You know, maybe that is beginners friendly, uh, rather than catching up with all the trends.

[00:40:13] The Importance of Promoting Our Writing

Henry Suryawirawan: So, I think one aspect after we write, finish it, uh, is, is always, uh, good to actually publish it, right? So don’t forget to publish it. Um, so publishing itself, it’s not enough, I think, right? So I think you would need to promote it, market it, somehow. Uh, some people these days, um, you know, maybe publish on Medium and Substack, maybe it gets recommended by the platform, but other people might post on their personal websites and things like that. Uh, and think that’s just it, right? So maybe tell, tell us, uh, why we should do promotion of our, you know, writing, and how can it be beneficial for us?

Piotr Sarna: So the obvious, uh, thing is that, uh, unless you do some kind of promotion , and you’re new, then nobody’s going to ever read it, because they wouldn’t find it, because we’ve got enough, uh, enough content being published every day. You might get lucky and land on Hacker News if something’s very interesting. But, uh, 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, mm, like technically speaking, there are multiple ways you can publish a blog post. The easiest one, if it’s, uh, just your technical company blog, and it happens to be a well maintained high quality blog, anyway. For instance, ScyllaDB 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. Uh, if you decide to self-publish, then obviously you also need to put in some more work, figure out, uh, things that Cynthia is expert about. And she wrote all, wrote, uh, all her knowledge condensed into these chapters, like how to make sure that people can actually find it, how to submit it to all kinds of aggregators, Hacker News, Lobsters, and all the other kinds of blogs. There is also a whole bunch of companies that, specialize 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 it’s actually not original. It comes from here, but, uh, repost them in on, uh, reposted it on their site. So that there are, yeah, whole bunch of, uh, tips and tricks how to make your, uh, blog post just. Um, visible to the, to the larger audience.

[00:42:47] How to Promote Your Writing Independently

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. I think those are some great tips, definitely, right? But what if, uh, let’s say I am a person, I don’t have any help, maybe from the company. I don’t have anyone with, know great networks. Uh, I’m just a, like a normal developer with small social media following probably, right? So what tips would you give us, would you recommend to actually, uh, start promoting, you know, our own content without, you know, such help?

Piotr Sarna: I was, first of all, lucky enough that my first, uh, few articles were, uh, just piggybacked on, on the tech, on the technical blog post that, uh, that my company had. But still, uh, especially after joining an, uh, in an earlier stage startup, uh, I broke my promise to never have a social media account. And I started using, back then, Twitter for promoting, just because everyone else was doing it because we, we really needed, uh, the company to get more broadly known.

But it does work exactly the same way with blog posts as well, your personal posts and, uh, well, to bootstrap yourself, uh, assuming that you have some kind of niche that you, that you were writing about a certain language or I dunno, databases, web programming, whatever else. If you just start engaging with the community, even reviewing someone else’s post, commenting about something, then you start getting those smaller circles. And then if you publish a post that is inter interesting to them, then, hopefully, some of them will share it and you’ll broaden your circle a little bit and you just go from there.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So yeah, definitely, I also learn like, uh, long form content, be it writing or maybe podcast is a, uh, kind of like longer term thing, right? You cannot just expect other people to find, uh, the content that you produce, right? Uh, first of all, yeah, you need to produce more. I guess it’s not just one time thing, also, that you promote and, you know, you expect others to find you. Uh, but also, yeah, ‘cause 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, uh, can be found by others if, let’s say it’s, uh, it’s found to be useful, uh, for some people.

[00:45:00] Future Opportunities of Writing

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think one aspect that you mentioned in the very beginning, and also in your book, right, you mentioned that blog post could be, uh, beginning of something that is bigger, right? So the most common aspects, uh, that normally people experience is, uh, being invited to write a book, just like in your case, right? Or maybe, uh, giving a talk in the conference if, let’s say the topic itself, uh, 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, uh, what, what benefits can it bring us, uh, just by writing, for example, blog posts?

Piotr Sarna: Yeah. First of all, my experience, uh, was again, a little bit specific, because I was also pretty much forced to, uh, go and present on my first, first, uh, conference live. But, uh, the thing with blog posts is that, first of all, you uh, you can get noticed by people who look for either speakers or authors or whatever, because this is exactly, you are exactly the target. You are somebody who posted something potentially interesting. So you, you have something interesting to say about this topic, so you are, you’re a great fit for writing a book about it or speaking about it.

The very nice thing about, uh, especially technical blog posts is that, uh, sometimes you can just, uh, 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, uh, if your structure is quite right and you’ve got these, uh, paragraphs, you’ve got some either benchmark results or maybe code snippets, whatever else. Those are slides. You can just often take them, and paste 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, uh, even moderately popular, then you know that there’s interest in the topic. So you can just, uh, you can just take it and present it in the other way because, uh, you, you’re simply covering more people, because, uh, some people prefer to just put your presentation in a, in another, uh, browser tab and listen to it. Some prefer to attend personally to a, to a conference and then then talk to you after your talk.

So you just, uh, take the same content. The hard part is done. You already, you 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, is just, yeah, that’s just a good idea. It’s, uh, you’re already more than halfway through after the blog post is out.

Henry Suryawirawan: 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, uh, writing the blog post.

[00:47:55] Writing as a Developer

Henry Suryawirawan: So, uh, Sarna, uh, is there any other thing that you wanna convey here? I know that we have covered and discussed a lot of things. Is there any, any other things that you wanna give us listeners here about aspects of, you know, writing as a developer? Is there any other things that you wanna cover today?

Piotr Sarna: Well, I could just repeat, uh, great words from, uh, Bryan Cantrill, who also, uh, quoted, uh, another person who quoted another person. These words are, “you’re not writing enough.” And I love this quote because it’s short and to the point. Uh, you should really consider sharing more, because, uh, there’s bound 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.

Henry Suryawirawan: I love it, right? So definitely we are all, we are all not writing enough. Be it, you know, at work, be it the personal thing. Sometimes, it could be your journal or diary, right? Just to distill your thoughts, right? Or things that you are, um, going through. So I think definitely writing more is, uh, something very useful.

[00:49:02] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

Henry Suryawirawan: So, uh, Sarna, as we reach the end of our conversation, I only have one last question that I’d like to ask you. Uh, I call this question the tech, the three technical leadership wisdom. So if you can think, if you can think of them, just like advice that you wanna give to us. So anything that you wanna share as part of your wisdom.

Piotr Sarna: Yeah, so chronologically from my career. First one would be to engage in open source. It really pays off. The second one would be to write more. And the third one to, uh, create a culture around you that encourages people to write more.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, lovely! So it’s all about contribution. It’s all about writing. So thank you for sharing those.

Piotr Sarna: Yeah.

Henry Suryawirawan: So for people who would love to, uh, maybe learn more from you, right, about this writing aspect or they wanna follow your online resources, is there a place where they can find you online?

Piotr Sarna: The best, uh, place to learn about, first of all, the um, book and a continuation of the book is, uh, a webpage writethat.blog. This is, uh, kind of an aggregator where we, uh, go through uh, new blog posts every month. We pick a few that are popular and categorize them with those patterns and, uh, shortly summarize why, why they’re interesting.

So this is a kind of, uh, blog post aggregator and, uh, promotion for the book that, that you can go and see.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. Thank you. I’ll put that in the show notes. So thank you again for your time today, Sarna. So I really love, uh, what you shared just now and, uh, especially the invitation for us to, you know, write more, I guess, because we are not writing enough.

Piotr Sarna: Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity to share. It was great!

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