Ask HN: How long does it take to write a high quality technical blog post? - diehunde
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Ayesh
Define high quality.

If you are new to blogging, and looking to improve, just keep practicing. Some
great blogs posts are worthless to other demographics, and sometimes a 10
minute post is what you'd end up as your most popular content.

Speaking from personal experience, I spend about 3 hours minimum on a blog
post. I write in markdown, and of I have to create graphs or diagrams, I spend
more time. There are some posts that took me a week or so to complete.

~~~
diehunde
I'm more concerned about quality in terms of minimal errors, good references
and correct content. Not worried about popularity at this moment. The problem
I have is I write something and I keep iterating over and over and try to find
ways to improve it.

~~~
gus_massa
3x4=12 hours. Something like: 4 hours for the first draft, 4 hours to
transform into the final form, and 4 hours to fix the small details. But don't
expect perfection.

It is important to know why are you making the post. If it is only a hobby,
that is good enough. If it is the technical blog to sell a product, it may
need more polishing.

Some people recommend to show the advanced draft/almost final form to a few
friends or coworkers to get feedback.

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CM30
To some degree, it depends exactly what the topic is, how much detail you're
willing to go into, how you want to format it, etc.

If you're writing a comprehensive tutorial for a new framework or design
pattern and including tons of code samples and resource links, that could
easily take a good few hours, days or even weeks. Same goes if the topic is
kinda niche and you're writing for experts in the field, like how to program
an in browser VR experience using the canvas element + multiple libraries and
frameworks and cutting edge ES6 features.

On the other hand if your post is a bit more modest and mostly deals with a
fairly familiar, limited concept, it could probably be done in an hour or less
depending on your personal expertise.

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taphangum
It really does depend on the kind of topic that you are teaching.

As others have stated here, it could be as little an hour to as long as a few
days.

There is, however, a framework that I use to speed things up a bit and put
probability a bit more in my favor when it comes to helping my potential
reader to understand better what I'm trying to explain.

I share some tips on the ways in which you may do this here:
[https://fromtoschool.com/why-most-programming-tutorials-
are-...](https://fromtoschool.com/why-most-programming-tutorials-are-so-hard-
to-understand-and-a-solution-to-this-problem/).

