
Show HN: Writing for Software Developers - philipkiely
https://philipkiely.com/wfsd/
======
braythwayt
Something, something, “Build your brand by writing.”

Something, something, “Communicating with words is as important as
communicating with code in a team setting.”

But moving up Maslow’s Hierarchy, writing about ideas you want to personally
explore (a’la pg) is exactly how you force yourself to think those ideas
through. It’s valuable in its own right, whether people read them and shower
you with the “three Ps” or not.

So write, and write often. Do not spend great amounts of time carefully
choosing what yo write. Just write, and incorporate feedback into your work.
Revise endlessly, much as one refactors software endlessly.

Do not write about things that don’t interest you just because you get more
up-boats for “How to use Flibbitz in a managed K8s container with XML
configuration,” unless Flibbitz personally interests you.

Write about what tickles your brain, and keep at it incessantly. What little
(and it’s not much in the scale of things) success I’ve had writing essays and
books can all be traced back to writing about things I personally care about.

~~~
wappa
What are the three P's?

~~~
andrei_says_
Yes, which?

[https://www.google.com/search?q=the+three+p%27s+of+writing&r...](https://www.google.com/search?q=the+three+p%27s+of+writing&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS590US590&oq=the+three+ps+of+wr&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0.15813j0j7&hl=en-
US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8)

~~~
severine
Haha, yeah! I'm having a blast looking at the search results...

Planet, People, Profit. People, process, product People, Process, Performance
Management Personalization, Permanence, Pervasiveness Polydipsia, Polyuria,
Polyphagia Product, Price, Place and Promotion Preserve / Prevent / Promote
Prediction, Protection, Preparation Purpose, Process, Product Protect,
Procreate, Provide. Protect, Provide, Profess Pee, Paper, Poo Purity,
Patience, Perseverance Provision, Protection, Participation Presence,
Promises, Power Of God Piracy, Portability, Profitability Presentation,
Planning, Processing

But still no idea... OP, which is it?

~~~
TheDarkOne
Practice, Practice, and Practice, I think.

------
sixhobbits
Hey Philip,

really great to see you run with this! I know you mentioned to me that this
repository[0] where I try to keep a short list of publishers that pay for this
kind of writing was an early inspiration and I'm still hoping to grow that
list a lot after June when I spend more time focusing on technical writing
too.

As others have said, that's a really great looking list of interviewees. My
only question is where this actually fits in to the rest of the book? It's not
that clear from the Table of Contents. Could you comment on what percentage of
the book is interviews, compared to writing advice?

[0] [https://github.com/sixhobbits/technical-
writing/blob/master/...](https://github.com/sixhobbits/technical-
writing/blob/master/write-for-us.md)

~~~
philipkiely
The table of contents outlines the book, which is about 30,000 of my words and
28,000 words of interview excerpts. Then, the appendix contains the full
transcripts of all 11 interviews, 45,000 words (which does overlap with the
interview excerpt word count from earlier).

------
chpmrc
Writing seems to be the single best thing you can do as a professional, in
other areas as well. I know people who were hired because of a single Medium
article that got a lot of traction (and made that person sort of a reference
in the industry). What do you think about videos? I see lifestyle channels for
devs and tech workers taking off but do you think there's a chance the same
might happen for more technical channels as well? I find technical videos
(like talks or tutorials) to be far more engaging than articles but I'm afraid
I'm part of a very small minority.

~~~
jonfw
Forced pace is a huge problem for videos. If you encounter a paragraph that
you already know all about in an article, you can skip it. If you encounter a
section of a video like that, it's harder to skip so I'll end up trying to sit
through it, getting bored, then distracted, and then who knows what I'll miss.

The 'killer feature' of writing is the ability to self-pace. To me that makes
them orders of magnitude more effective as a means of communicating ideas.

~~~
skummetmaelk
Written materials can also be used as reference much more easily. You can't
ctr+f a video to look for the specific nugget of information you need.

------
philipkiely
Hi HN,

I have been working on Writing for Software Developers for six months and I'm
so excited to finally launch it! I set myself the goal of launching before my
(now virtual) university graduation and I'm proud to have hit that goal by six
days.

Right now the book is 12 dollars off (launch pricing) and you can read chapter
1 for free at
[https://philipkiely.com/assets/files/wfsd_chapter1_sample.pd...](https://philipkiely.com/assets/files/wfsd_chapter1_sample.pdf)

The book features interviews with 11 people, including @patio11 (Patrick
McKenzie), who had the following to say about Hacker News. This quote is from
Chapter 15, which covers promoting your work:

"At one point I was the number two user on Hacker News. I might have slipped
down to number three...I think that people underrate Hacker News massively. I
think there is a meme in the community that Hacker News threads are populated
by toxic commenters and that it is a ceaselessly negative place such that the
world would be better without Hacker News in it. I think unequivocally Hacker
News is an extraordinary venue for value creation throughout the world,
largely by bringing together technologists who would not have otherwise met
each other. There are people who make lifelong relationships from that site. I
met my former co-founders there; Thomas Ptacek is one of my best friends for
life; and it feels extremely unlikely that I would have my current job but for
Hacker News. I think you could say that for many people who are nowhere close
to being quote-unquote on the leaderboard.

Hacker News helps disseminate ideas, like my ideas on sales and engineering
career optimization and the body of practice that is dealing with venture
funding, both from the startup side of the fence and from the investor side of
the fence. These things would be difficult to get access to unless you had a
high-quality social network that already had an expert about them in it. It is
basically one step short of miraculous that you could find George Grellas, who
is an expert Silicon Valley lawyer practicing for thirty years, and have
George Grellas patiently walk you through the impacts of the changes in the
independent contractor classification in the wake of Microsoft abuses in the
1990s. By the way, George Grellas was a practicing lawyer for Microsoft. That
I could read that as a person who was newly an independent contractor working
in central Japan in the late 2000s/early 2010s is one step short of
miraculous.

I'll acknowledge that there are certain threads that are generally low
quality, mostly things that are removed from the core interests of the
technology industry. It's not a particularly great watering hole to talk about
politics, for example. But, for the things it does well, Hacker News does them
better than plausibly any place in the world...I wish more people who could
get value out of Hacker News were active there."

Thanks to all eleven people who provided interviews for the book. Thank you
for checking out my project! I'll be around to answer any questions.

~~~
swyx
thats awesome, congrats on launching!

as a fellow soon-to-be first time gumroad author - what was your tech stack
for writing and publishing? i tried Ulysses and Scrivener and Leanpub and
wasn't happy with any of them. looking to go from markdown to PDF/Epub/Mobi
with good control over table of contents, footnotes, and linking between
chapters.

i have a list of alternatives to explore.. just wondering what worked for you?

also - how did you mock up that book cover art on the landing page?

~~~
philipkiely
I wrote in Markdown as well. I turned that into a microsoft word doc that I
formatted then created the PDF. I used pandoc to create the EPUB, then calibre
to make the MOBI from the EPUB. I tried to use pandoc to make the PDF but it
did not go well, word was surprisingly easy to use for that.

The cover art was created by a friend of mine from college. I used
[https://diybookcovers.com/3Dmockups/](https://diybookcovers.com/3Dmockups/)
to make the image on the landing page.

------
AminPhakhruddin
Hey Philip,

Congrats on the launch of your new book. Will probably be checking out the
first chapter after work.

As I've been hanging out more online, I've realized the increasing importance
of writing. Even as a developer, writing seems to be a differentiating factor.

Other than your book, what are some other resources that you relied on in
order to build up your skills as a writer? Or did you just rely on reading and
emulating people's works.

~~~
philipkiely
Hey!

Thanks for checking it out. One of the reasons I wrote this book was because
there were so few resources for me starting out. I mostly relied on my
experience as a journalist with my college's newspaper plus the training we
got in CS classes on writing good documentation.

------
tdrgabi
I didn't carefully read the whole article, scanned through it and read the
comments. Sorry if I missed the answer.

Is this an intro / "how to" book about technical writting, or a book with a
series of interviews with good writers. In the same genre as "Founders at
work"?

~~~
philipkiely
Both! The first act is step-by-step on how to write technical tutorials. The
second act is examples of that process. The third act is about the business of
writing. All of that is a book that I wrote, but does rely heavily on block
quotes from interview subjects, plus 30,000 of my own words :)

Then, the appendix contains all of the interview transcripts, totaling 45,000
words.

~~~
tdrgabi
Thank you for clarifying

------
xueyongg
Keep writing!! I've personally started my journey into content creation as a
software engineer just this year! To be more focused, I found a growing
passion for Design Patterns and started writing my learning about them. Hope
to share the same passion with you! Keep going pal! Would love to hear some
tips from you! Here's my site, and hope it encourages you all!

[https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-03-3-more-cloud-
de...](https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-03-3-more-cloud-design-
pattern)

~~~
rhlsthrm
This is so cool! I’ve just started myself (still putting together my blog). I
really want to learn functional programming, maybe writing about it would be a
good way to start on my journey too!

~~~
xueyongg
I'm definitely supporting you on this idea! I've learnt so much through "Learn
as you teach" methodology. Do share your site once you have started it (:

Oh and personally, as a way to learn my frontend development skill, I also
created my blog from scratch through a frontend framework! You can consider
that as well

------
liamN
Wowowow! I've only read the FREE first chapter so far, but honestly, I'm
pretty hooked. If the rest of the book is as useful and well-written as the
first chapter (which I suspect it is) then the price is a steal. Following
this book's advice in writing your own tech articles will earn you your money
back from buying it within a couple of weeks.

Well done philipkiely!

------
_Understated_
The purchase link isn't working for me. I get a certificate error.

Edit: It appears that by connecting via my VPN, it gives me a certificate
error when the link redirects via gum.co... goes away when I disable it.

Seems worrying...

~~~
philipkiely
I'm sorry you experienced difficulty purchasing it. If you are still having
issues you can email me philip@kiely.xyz I'll see what I can do.

------
suyash
The website says "Earn money, make connections, and get noticed.The rates I
earn from writing, usually $250 to $500 per article, add up." What are some
ways to do that exactly?

------
DmitryOlshansky
I wanted to just automatically say booring! But then I clicked the link and I
love it, thank you!

It’s short, simple and to the point. My personal holy trinity. See you around)

~~~
DmitryOlshansky
Downvotes? Love it)

~~~
dang
Please don't break the site guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

------
eykd
Hey Philip, this is great. I'm curious, what tools did you use to produce the
book?

~~~
philipkiely
I wrote in Markdown. I turned that into a microsoft word doc that I formatted
then created the PDF. I used pandoc to create the EPUB, then calibre to make
the MOBI from the EPUB. I tried to use pandoc to make the PDF but it did not
go well, word was surprisingly easy to use for that. The cover art was created
by a friend of mine from college. I used
[https://diybookcovers.com/3Dmockups/](https://diybookcovers.com/3Dmockups/)
to make the image on the landing page.

------
santiagobasulto
Amazing! Just purchased it. Thanks Phillip.

Question on the side: does anybody know of a good app that could "read" the
epub for me? I feel like I could listen to these interviews while doing chores
at home.

~~~
shacrw
This app @Voice Aloud Reader is great for all kinds of docs. You can even long
press paras in Chrome Android and in the long-press menu there'll be an option
for Reading it Aloud.

epub,PDF etc. supported too, all details in app description.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hyperionic...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hyperionics.avar&hl=en_IN)

------
spacedog
"Throughout college, also I have sought physical engagement outside of martial
arts, taking up climbing and lifting." [0]

Not to be harsh, but I wouldn't buy a book from someone writing about writing
that writes awkward/grammatically incorrect sentences like the one above. Also
your background doesn't "checkout". You're writing about writing for software
engineers, but how long have you been a software engineer? 3 years? 5 years?

Again, my comments are a little harsh, but this has to stop with people
filling the internet with useless content, making it harder and harder to find
good content.

[0] ([https://philipkiely.com/essays/black-belt-white-
belt.html](https://philipkiely.com/essays/black-belt-white-belt.html))

~~~
philipkiely
Thank you for taking the time to let me know how to improve my writing. Would
you be so kind as to provide editorial feedback on other pages on my site? I
look forward to incorporating your suggestions next time I revise my work.

