A title like “Writing for Developers” catches easily my attention. For a matter of fact, I enjoy writing and despite English not being my mother tongue, I still like to put my thoughts into written words, often in English.

I was hoping that this book would help me to become a better writer. It offers plenty pointers, like all the links to blog post examples, but I finished reading with a taste of misalignment. It’s no goal of mine to be successful in the book’s terms, i.e. hitting the first page of Hacker News or any other catchy outlet.

As much as I enjoy writing, I know there’s much room for improvement in the quality of my writing. The book touches on how to get orginazed in outlining a blog post, traps to avoid but what I keep in the end as most precious is the list of links shared as examples, they are all available in the accompanying GitHub repository.

The book helps to group blog posts into different categories and for each one it gives examples. I’m sure that to get better at writing, you need to read quite a bit so this list on its own is a worthy start.

A few tips I’d like to keep in mind: bold the prepositions in an attempt to see what could be dropped, highlight the “to be” verbs again to refactor towards a more effective wording (same tip for the word “very”), be affirmative it’s easier for the brain, stay consistent in verb tense and how the reader is addressed, read a draft out loud to spot problems.

The afterwords calls for more blogs, Tweet less. Blogs are owned by you… Share because you want to help, but also because you want to help yourself. That’s actually my ultimate goal in keeping my blog, simply to track and document for my own sake. I want to read back what I wrote and enjoy it. Because I see I progressed, because it makes me remember how I felt.