Forem: Jeff Morhous

Writing Technical Content That Stands Out From AI

Jeff Morhous — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 21:12:07 +0000

Artificial intelligence tools are quickly transforming content creation, making technical articles that truly stand out is more crucial than ever. To rise above the AI-generated noise, content creators must produce the absolute best article on a given topic, providing insights that machines can't offer.

This means digging into niche areas where AI training may be limited or even focusing on new technical developments beyond the scope of current AI models. By leaning on human expertise, real-world experience, and up-to-date knowledge, people can create content that not only educates our developers better than Large Language Models can.

In this article, we'll explore strategies to ensure your technical content remains valuable, relevant, and distinct in the age of AI.

Focusing on Developer Education

One of the best strategies to produce technical content that stands out is to focus on developer education. Content marketing can be boiled down to a few goals, and educational content satisfies two of the most important:

Build authority and trust with potential customers
Bring in readers from organic search

Writing genuinely helpful educational content for developers often means answering questions like "How do I do x in y framework?" or "What are the differences between framework 1 and framework 2?"

Developers are quick to adopt tools that make their work more efficient, and the adoption of generative AI is quickly replacing search tools like Google as software engineers' tool of choice for answering technical questions. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on massive amounts of data, meaning they're great at answering general questions and not so great at giving specific answers. Contrary to how it seems, tools like ChatGPT aren't actually thinking, leaving a content gap for answering deep questions about niche technical problems.

Before the days of generative AI, articles like "How to write a for loop in Java" might bring in a great deal of traffic if you could rank highly for them, but sites that focus on shallow problems like these are quickly losing traffic from search. When you write educational content as content marketing, you should focus on deeply challenging problems that AI doesn't provide a good answer to. Perhaps integrate this sort of check into your content planning process so that you can consistently publish valuable content that helps software engineers answer questions that AI can't.

Producing Interactive Content

The best educational content is interactive.

Whether it's tutorials or step-by-step guides, content that gives the reader a chance to reinforce what they learned is more likely to benefit them, which is the whole point of educational content!

Interactive content can take many forms, like:

Narrative/story-driven explanations
Hands-on tutorials
Quizzes at the end of sections to check reader understanding
In-depth guides that can be followed

Developer read technical content to either solve immediate problems or expand their knowledge, and just reading something is not often a good way to learn. Not only will interactive content make readers more likely to walk away having learned something, but it will keep them on your site longer, which is a great signal to search engines that your article is helpful to searchers.

Writing about New Developments

AI tools can only truthfully answer queries about things in or related to their training data. While sometimes these tools hallucinate answers that lead readers astray, other times they'll simply tell a reader that their "knowledge cutoff" makes them unable to answer a given query.

This presents an obvious, albeit temporary opportunity to produce technical content focused on new software releases. Focusing on articles that answer questions about things that AI tools haven't been trained on removes AI tools from the competition almost entirely, making it easier to stand out. People will end up searching the web for answers to these questions, meaning search volume for that topic will be unaffected by AI until the tools are retrained with newer data.

Practically, this can look like several things, including:

Writing upgrade guides on moving from one version of React to another
Writing a case study on how a Ruby upgrade affected application performance
Writing a tutorial on using a new feature of a popular library

Using Images and Graphs

One of the many keys to great creating technical content is to use images to keep readers engaged. While most AI tools can generate images, they tend not to do so when answering technical queries.

Many people are visual learners, and you can make your article more valuable to them than a conversation with an AI tool if you use plenty of high-quality images to explain technical concepts and show off working projects during a tutorial.

Developers will love checking that their work aligns with the tutorial in a way that they can't with an AI conversation, and search tools will reward pages that use high-quality images.

Leveraging AI Tools

Yes, it's ironic, but you should use AI tools to make your content better.

You should not use AI tools to make your content for you, but you should lean on the tools like you might lean on a friend or colleague to check your work.

During content planning, ask a tool like ChatGPT to outline important parts of an article on your topic, then compare that to your existing outline to see if there is anything that the tool thought to include that you may have omitted. You'll still have to make the decision yourself, but it can be a helpful gut check to make sure you're not missing something obvious.

After you're done writing, you can even ask an LLM to write the article for you, then read through it, and make sure that your article is obviously better. Articles that aren't clearly better than their AI-generated counterparts aren't ready to be published, so use the tools to raise the bar for your team.

Another step that's helpful as part of a more comprehensive editing process is to use an AI tool like Claude to give you feedback on your article. A good AI prompt for this might be something like this:

You are the world's best technical and copy editor. I'm going to give you an article on {insert topic here}. You will give me feedback. This article needs to be the best article on the internet, so point out any content that might be confusing to a reader. Point out redundant things that can be deleted. Make suggestions for things I may have missed. Give me any other feedback that you need in order for this to be helpful for a reader: {Paste article}

You're competing for reader attention with AI tools, so you may as well use them to make that competition unfair.

Using a Technical Content Marketing Agency

By implementing these strategies, you can create technical content that not only stands out from AI-generated material but also truly serves and engages your developer audience.

If you're looking to raise the bar for your technical content, SyntaxPen offers real, experienced human insights that go beyond what AI can offer. Our writers bring practical knowledge and understanding to every piece, ensuring that the content is not just informative, but also grounded in real-world application and best practices.

The Ultimate Guide to Refreshing Programming Tutorials

Jeff Morhous — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 02:56:31 +0000

If you're looking to improve technical content on your site, one of the first things you should do is refresh your older programming tutorials. There's little ROI in making new programming tutorials if all of the traffic to your existing articles is unsatisfied with what they find.

In this article, we'll first talk about why you should refresh your programming tutorials. Then, we'll dive into how to get the greatest return on your time when refreshing these tutorials. We'll cover updating screenshots, updating library and language versions, and updating links.

We'll also dig into what it takes to make sure your tutorial is incredible, and we'll touch on SEO optimization for tutorials as well. By the end of this guide, you should be confident that the effort you invest into bringing your tutorials up to date is well-spent.

Why You Should Refresh Your Programming Tutorials

Periodically refreshing older programming tutorials on your site helps you get the most value out of the assets you already have. You've already put the time or money into creating detailed educational content for developers, so it makes sense to put in the work to maintain its integrity.

You wouldn't plant a garden and never tend to it. You shouldn't publish technical content and expect it to stay fresh over time. Technology moves fast, and things get out of date quickly. Publishing the best tutorial on a programming topic is a huge win for a business, but it's also a moving target.

Outdated tutorials cause developers to lose trust in your brand. One of the biggest goals of publishing technical content is establishing your brand as a trusted voice in the developer community. Going through old content with regularity helps you put your best foot forward.

To put it concisely, here are the biggest reasons that programming tutorials need to be refreshed periodically:

Languages get updates that may break tutorial instructions
Frameworks get updates that may break tutorial instructions
Tools often change, making screenshots out of date
Outdated tutorials leave a bad impression on visitors
Outdated tutorials increase bounce rates, which hurts SEO

In the rest of the article, we'll show you concrete steps to take when editing technical content.

Updating Language and Library Versions

Your tutorials took time to write, and they take time to maintain too. If a developer begins a tutorial and sees an outdated version of React, they're likely to bounce back to Google, which hurts your trust and SEO.

Every hands-on programming tutorial instructs the reader to do something in a language of choice. Over time, the syntax of a given programming language changes. While language design changes often don't break existing code, using an old language version is a common sign to a developer that a tutorial is outdated, leading them to wonder if the tutorial is still valid. Some language updates, like Python 2 to Python 3, are large enough changes to require changes to the way tutorials are written.

Even more common than language updates are framework and library updates. While JavaScript might not change often, popular libraries like React frequently change in ways that make tutorials useless. Using an outdated version of React in a tutorial is fine only if the reader is also using the outdated language version. Readers want to solve the problem they're searching for help on with the tools they're already using, so keeping tutorials up to date with the latest library or framework updates is important!

Programming tutorials should always list software versions that the tutorial assumes the reader is using at the beginning of the article so that the reader knows what assumptions the writer has. This makes versions easy to audit as part of a tutorial refresh. The editor that is refreshing a tutorial should check the versions of languages and frameworks being used in a tutorial against the current versions and make any upgrades necessary to bring the tutorial up to date.

Updating Screenshots

Another important part of tutorials to keep up to date are the screenshots. High-quality screenshots help readers know they're on the right track, so outdated screenshots can be confusing or even frustrating.

Screenshots are also one of the best ways to stand out from AI-generated content, as LLMs aren't able to generate screenshots alongside their instructions. Programmers who are having no luck solving their problem with an AI tool should be delighted by the screenshots in your tutorial.

Great screenshots should:

Be high resolution
Contain only easy-to-read text
Not contain sensitive information like API keys
Be cropped appropriately
Be up to date with the latest changes to project/framework/dependencies

Updating screenshots is an absolute must when refreshing programming tutorials. It's the most loved part of our technical editing service, where we have a practicing software engineer go through a tutorial and complete it as part of the editing process.

Updating Links

The next crucial part of updating tutorials is to update links. This applies to any article but is especially crucial for technical content. It's also especially important for internal links, as this helps Google understand your site structure and page relationships.

As you go through an article to edit it, click every link to ensure that it's still valid. URLs change over time, and links go stale. Beyond ensuring that links go somewhere, ensure that the anchor text of the link tells an accurate story about where the link will take the visitor.

Links should have descriptive anchor text that tells the reader what to expect if they click. Here's an example of bad anchor text:

For more information, see the Python documentation here

Here's an example of better anchor text:

For more information, see the Python documentation

For an even better link, you should make sure that the page you link to is a great source of information, and specific enough to be quickly helpful. The above example could be further enhanced to:

For more information, see the Python documentation on integer literals.

As you go through and update links, take the opportunity to note any links that might make for good resources on your own site. This is often called the wiki strategy, where you make sure the reader has all the information they need on your own site. It's a great way to come up with relevant new content ideas and increases the time visitors spend on your site.

Optimizing for a Great Tutorial

The most immediately obvious part of refreshing a tutorial is to make sure it's a great tutorial. Ideally, you've done this as part of your writing and review process, but the extra time between writing and editing makes it easier to spot things that aren't clear.

The best way to make sure a programming tutorial is great is to actually do the tutorial. If the article is thought leadership, this section doesn't apply. But for practical, hands-on tutorials that instruct the reader to do something, it's important to have a practicing software engineer go through the article and follow the instructions exactly. This will illuminate anything outdated or broken, as well as provide opportunities for clarifying instructions and updating screenshots.

Great programming tutorials should be sure to:

Contain a good introduction that describes what the reader will learn
List all prerequisites with links to instructions
Use consistent voice and style
Have code blocks with proper language annotation
Contain only code samples that follow a language's best practices
Contain only code samples that have consistent spacing
Contain only code samples that follow best practices for a language (like passing a popular linting tool)
Be easy to follow given the reader has the prerequisite knowledge
Show the reader how to do the thing promised in the introduction

Be sure to follow your article top-to-bottom, just like a reader would. As you complete the instructions, follow this checklist to find and fix issues that you find.

Optimizing for SEO

One of the biggest goals of technical content marketing is to bring traffic from organic search to your site. If your articles aren't optimized for search, your efforts could be wasted.

Fortunately, the most important SEO virtue is trust. When readers trust your content, Google picks up on these signals and increases your rankings. The most important SEO optimization you can make for an article is to put all that you can into making it the most valuable article for a given topic. Ensuring that your content is of the highest quality provides incredible value for readers, which necessarily hints to Google that your content is valuable to other searchers.

Beyond just making sure you have great content, there are a few things to keep in mind for SEO when updating tutorials. First, you should use descriptive H2 headers to separate sections of content in articles. These H2 headings should contain long-tail keywords you're trying to rank for and will be a strong signal to Google what queries your content should rank for.

Second, your article should be easy to parse for a reader. H2 headings are helpful for this, but so is avoiding huge walls of text, including images, using bullet points, and leveraging tables. These changes make content scannable, which keeps readers engaged and signals to Google that your content is a good resource for the searcher.

Lastly, your article should contain internal (descriptive) links where appropriate. If you're mentioning a topic that you've covered on your site, link to that resource with descriptive anchor text. This ensures the reader can get the information they need without leaving your site, which is a good signal for search engines. It also helps Google understand the relationship between pages, and high-ranking pages may pass page-rank authority to the lower-ranking pages to which they link.

Conclusion

Refreshing your programming tutorials is not just about keeping up with technology—it's about maintaining trust with your audience and maximizing the ROI of your content. By updating language versions, refreshing screenshots, and ensuring all links are current, you not only improve user experience but also boost SEO performance.

At SyntaxPen, we specialize in helping businesses build libraries of technical content that build their brand as a trusted voice in the developer community. Whether through our comprehensive technical editing service or one ofour full-service options, we're here to ensure your tutorials remain valuable and trusted resources in the developer community.

This post was originally written on the SyntaxPen blog

Technical Content Marketing for Brand Awareness

Jeff Morhous — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 20:28:35 +0000

Building developer tools is a competitive space, so standing out from the crowd is crucial. One of the most effective ways to build brand awareness and establish authority in the tech industry is through technical content marketing. Through creating high-quality, educational content, you can capture the attention of developers and technical leaders, ultimately driving adoption of your tools and services.

In this article, we'll dig into the key strategies for using technical articles to boost your brand's visibility and authority among developers.

Understanding The Devtools Marketing Audience

Before you start crafting content, it's essential to know who you're writing for. Your target audience in the devtools space primarily consists of developers and technical decision-makers. These individuals have significant influence over purchasing decisions and are always on the lookout for solutions to improve their workflow.

To create effective content, you need to:

Identify your specific developer audience (e.g., front-end developers, DevOps engineers, data scientists, platform engineers, etc.)
Create detailed personas that represent your ideal readers
Understand their pain points, challenges, and interests

By understanding your audience's needs and preferences, you can tailor your content to address their specific concerns and showcase how your brand can provide value. If you're going to invest the time or money into creating technical content, you need to ensure it's written for the audience that aligns most with your business.

Choosing the Right Topics for Brand Awareness

Understanding your audience sets the stage for the next step of content planning. Selecting engaging topics is crucial for capturing your audience's attention and establishing your brand as a thought leader. You don't want to waste your resources writing on things your audience doesn't care about. When planning technical content, consider:

Aligning topics with your brand's expertise: Focus on subjects where your company has unique insights or solutions to offer.
Addressing current trends and challenges: Stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the dev world and create content that tackles emerging issues.
Balancing evergreen content with timely subjects: While it's important to cover hot topics, don't neglect foundational content that will remain relevant for years to come.

Remember, the goal is to provide genuine value to your readers. By consistently delivering insightful and helpful content, you'll naturally build trust and awareness for your brand.

Crafting Effective Technical Content

Once you've chosen your topics, it's time to create content that resonates with your audience. One of the most important things to keep in mind is to strike a balance between depth and accessibility. Your content should be thorough enough to satisfy experienced developers while remaining approachable for those new to the topic.

At SyntaxPen, we believe the most effective technical content is educational content for developers. Writing on topics developers care about and quickly providing them a thorough solution to their problem is an incredible way to build trust in your brand.

Optimizing for SEO and Readability

Great content deserves to be found. To maximize your articles' reach and impact:

Conduct keyword research: Focus on technical terms and phrases that your audience is likely to search for.
Structure your articles for easy scanning: Use clear headings, subheadings, and bullet points to break up text and guide readers through your content.
Optimize your formatting: Use short paragraphs, highlight key points, and include plenty of white space to improve readability.

Remember, while SEO is important, your primary goal should be to create valuable content for your readers. Providing value to visitors come first. Search engines will pick up on this value exchange over time and reward your site with higher domain authority.

Before you dive too deep into creating new technical content, you should refresh your existing content to ensure you get the most value.Search engines reward high-quality, user-focused content, so prioritize your audience's needs over keyword stuffing.

Showcasing Your Brand's Unique Value

While your content should primarily focus on educating and helping your audience, it's also an opportunity to subtly highlight your brand's strengths. Here's how:

Integrate your product or service naturally: When relevant, demonstrate how your tools can solve the problems you're discussing.
Highlight your company's expertise: Share insights from your team's experience and showcase your innovative approaches to common challenges.
Include real-world use cases and success stories: Demonstrate the practical applications of your solutions through case studies and testimonials.

The key is to maintain a balance. Your content should provide value even to readers who don't end up using your product, but it should also clearly demonstrate why your brand is worth considering.

Conclusion

Technical content marketing is a powerful tool for building brand awareness in the devtools industry. By understanding your audience, choosing the right topics, crafting high-quality content, and effectively promoting your articles, you can establish your brand as a trusted authority in your field. Still, building brand awareness is just one of several goals of technical content marketing

Remember, consistency is key. Building brand awareness through content marketing is a long-term strategy that requires patience and persistence. But with time and effort, you'll see your brand's reputation grow, leading to increased visibility, trust, and ultimately, business success.

Start implementing these strategies today, and watch as your brand becomes a go-to resource for developers and technical leaders in your space. A technical content marketing agency can help you knock technical content out of the park. These specialized teams work with you to create and publish high-value content without burdening your team. If one of SyntaxPen's content marketing services is a fit for you, reach out today!

The was originally written as a resource on SyntaxPen's website

Effectively Marketing Devtools with Educational Content

Jeff Morhous — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 03:14:12 +0000

This was originally published as a resource on SyntaxPen's website.

Building awareness for developer tools and other B2B products for technical audiences is a notoriously hard marketing niche. One of the most effective strategies for devtools marketing is technical content marketing, where a business writes high-quality content for technical audiences to attract their attention.

Technical content marketing has many goals and strategies in common with traditional content marketing. In all content marketing, you must focus on building trust with your audience. As you do that, you signal to Google that your audience trusts you with helpful content and backlinks. When Google begins to recognize you as a trusted source of information, it sends more and more searchers your way.

Companies invest in technical content marketing to build a sustainable magnet for developer attention that pays dividends over time.

Some Devtools Marketing Challenges

Marketing anything to a technical audience requires considerable overlap of marketing skills and technicals skill. All technical audiences have a high bar for technical products and are more interested in how a product directly solves their problem than an expensive marketing campaign.

Technical leadership leans on individual contributors for purchasing decisions of technical products, which leads to developers having a good deal of influence in buying decisions. Marketing devtools requires marketing directly to the end user, not just executives.

Technical content marketing is especially hard to execute for this reason. Great content marketers can succeed in a lot of industries, but technical audiences respond best to content written by subject matter experts. Convincing a reader that their team would benefit from a CI/CD pipeline requires that the writer understand the pain that such a tool solves. Many teams have found this content best written by software developers who happen to be incredible writers, which are hard to find.

Writing Educational Content for Technical Audiences

So how can we effectively market devtools with content marketing?

The strategy we've seen best work for clients at SyntaxPen is consistently publishing unique educational content.

If you're writing for developers, educational content often looks like this:

Programming tutorials
Library walkthroughs
Introductions to new frameworks
Guides on interesting software engineering concepts

If you're writing for engineering leadership, educational content often looks like this:

Thought leadership around real problems they face
Industry news and trends
Product comparisons

Writing great educational content is a direct way to show developers that your brand is trustworthy, because it's immediately verifiable.

You put in the effort to make a piece of educational material that's genuinely helpful
Some people in your audience read it and get something valuable out of it
Some of those readers enter the top of your funnel and turn into customers
The time spent on your site signals to Google that your brand is trustworthy
Your content is shown to even more searchers

While it's time-consuming to start, this strategy quickly builds into a flywheel that sends incredible amounts of attention to your site.

Conclusion

Investing in high-quality technical content is challenging but highly effective for marketing devtools and other B2B products to technical audiences. A specialized technical content marketing agency, like SyntaxPen, can significantly streamline this process. Our writers have consistently created trusted educational content that has been featured in prominent newsletters such as Ruby Weekly and DevOps Weekly.

For more details, see our comprehensive guide on how a technical content marketing agency can enhance your strategy.

How a Technical Content Marketing Agency Works

Jeff Morhous — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 02:58:09 +0000

This article was originally published as a technical content marketing resource at SyntaxPen.

In today's competitive content landscape, technical content marketing agencies play a pivotal role in helping businesses reach and engage their target audiences. These specialized agencies blend deep technical knowledge with marketing expertise to craft compelling content that resonates with developers, engineers, and other technical professionals.

By focusing on creating high-quality, accurate, and valuable content, these agencies build trust and authority within developer communities. This article explores the unique challenges of technical content marketing and how partnering with an agency can help your business.

How Content Marketing Works

Content marketing revolves around creating content to bring attention to your business. In this article, we'll mostly discuss written articles, but content marketing extends into videos, podcasts, and more!

When you're doing content marketing well, your ideal customer asks a question and arrives at your site for an answer.

Typically they'll ask their question in the form of a search query to a search engine like Google, but as you grow your audience you will attract traffic through other mediums like word of mouth or email lists.

When readers arrive at your site as a result of a search, they should read educational articles that quickly solve their problems. Giving readers this free, up-front value is a great way to build a reputation as a trusted source in your niche.

After you attract customers, your content educates them, then you have a chance to convert some subset of them into paying customers.

Not everyone who arrives at a particular article on your site will find that it solves their problem, and that's okay! Not everyone who has a problem solved by a piece of your content will convert into a customer, and that's okay too.

Content marketing is about sustainably building a reputation over the long term with traffic that has a heavy concentration of potential customers. You'll find that as your posts get more and more readers, you'll naturally have more and more inbound leads.

What Makes Technical Content Hard

Technical content marketing is more than just a niche in content marketing. Much of the internet is full of content marketing written with executives in mind, as many B2B product purchasing decisions end up being made mostly by executives. Technical products like developer tools are unique in this way, as developers have a huge voice in product purchasing decisions that affect them. Marketing technical products effectively requires gaining the trust of developers.

Here's the hard part. Traditional content marketing isn't effective for developers. Content written for software developers, software engineers, or technical leadership has to be technically accurate. Technical audiences will scrutinize technical articles, and they'll quickly lose interest if they feel the content lacks value or accuracy.

When planning content strategy for technical audiences, you'll quickly find that you have to write about what software engineers are actually interested in. Most teams will arrive at the conclusion that writing about real, specific, and novel problems in software is the best way to give real value to technical audiences.

Developers Trust Content Written by Developers

Marketing to developers requires building a brand with developers themselves, which is hard for professional writers or traditional content agencies.

The best content for software developers is written by software developers.

Who better to explain a technical concept or walk a reader through a programming tutorial than someone who is actually in the intended audience?

This presents another problem - great programmers are not all great writers. In fact, this is a pretty narrow set of people. Writing great articles for programmers is not the same skill as programming. In the next section, we'll compare finding this talent in your business, leaning on freelancers, and working with a specialized agency.

Doing Technical Content In-House vs Freelancers vs Agencies

Now that we've discussed what technical content marketing is and what makes it hard, you're probably wondering - How do I get technical content on my blog? Do I need to hire someone for that?

When it comes to producing technical content for your business, you have a few options:

You do it in-house with talent on your payroll
You hire a freelancer
You work with an agency

If your business is in building products that developers are interested in, you might have someone on your team who would be able to help! Most teams start producing technical content this way but find it challenging to scale. Every hour you ask a developer to write for your blog is an hour they're not spending working on the rest of their job. Still, leaning on your existing team to write technical content is a great strategy for producing authentic, valuable, and high-quality articles without directly increasing your costs.

You could also expand your in-house team to include someone dedicated to technical content marketing. Sometimes developer advocates fill this role, and some companies even have dedicated technical writers.

Freelancers are a great option when you want to scale your technical content operation beyond your own team. There are tons of incredible freelance technical content writers out there writing great stuff - I started as a freelance technical writer myself! It's hard to find a great freelancer with consistent availability in any industry, and marketplaces like Upwork can be unpredictable.

Technical Content Marketing Agencies help you produce this sort of content without so much involvement from your team. Typically, these businesses have processes and a team in place that make them more efficient. Many agencies will do everything from planning to writing to editing and even publishing. Having a full-service team working with you lets you treat technical content marketing as a product your business is purchasing instead of a task for your team.

Different Technical Content Services

The most obvious service you can expect from a technical writing business is article writing. Typically this is company announcements, think pieces, articles that explore technical concepts, or even programming tutorials. This is packaged differently depending on who you're working with - Here at SyntaxPen our full-service technical content marketing is typically done in engagements of at least one quarter and includes a collaborative content planning process.

You might need more than just article writing for your business. Here is a more comprehensive list of services that technical content teams offer:

Article writing
Content strategy/planning
Technical Editing (SyntaxPen offers this as a standalone service!)
Website sales copy
Ad copy
Product documentation
Example projects
Technical Reviewing (SyntaxPen offers this as a standalone service!)

Conclusion

By leveraging a technical content team's expertise in creating accurate, valuable, and compelling articles, you can build trust and authority with developers. Whether you decide to produce content in-house, hire freelancers, or work with a specialized agency, the key is to provide real value to your readers.

If you're looking for professional assistance with editing, reviewing, or full-service writing, SyntaxPen is here to help. Our team is the perfect intersection of software engineering expertise and writing ability, and we'd love to partner with you.

Redefining Career Specialization

Jeff Morhous — Sun, 02 Jun 2024 02:55:32 +0000

❤️ This post was originally published on my blog ❤️

In my short career, I've spent a bit of time thinking about:

How do I be the best software engineer?
What goes into an outstanding career?
How can I be considered a valuable individual contributor?

Conversations I've had with peers and mentors quickly turn to the topic of specialization. If you read around online, you'll find a lot of arguments about whether it's better to be a specialist or a generalist in terms of the skills you build.

This is an especially notable topic when considering software engineering careers, because there's so much to learn, you can't possibly be the best at all of it.

Specialist vs Generalist

Cal Newport writes often that if you want something above-average from your career, you have to provide above-average value.

In his "So Good They Can't Ignore You", he puts it clearly:

If you want something that’s both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return—this is Supply and Demand 101. It follows that if you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.

The whole question of specializing vs generalizing for me is really a question of how I can offer the best value to my team. If I were superhuman, I would just become the best at all programming things and while I'm at it become the best at business things too. But that's not realistic, so many of us find ourselves wondering where best to focus our limited energy.

It seems to be common advice, at least in software, that specializing after building a foundation of knowledge is a good way to differentiate yourself. But what does it mean to specialize?

Saying that it's good to specialize isn't specific enough.

If I specialize in Ruby, am I really specialized?
What about Ruby on Rails?
What about backend Ruby on Rails?

Even knowing that it's a good move to specialize still isn't enough information to make an actionable decision about what to get good at.

Keep Redefining What You Do

We already know that being the best at what you do is great.

I don't know about you, but becoming the world's best programmer seems like a daunting task for me. Naval talks a bit about how redefining what you do to make it easier to stand out:

If you really want to get paid in this world, you want to be number one at whatever you do. It can be niche—that’s the point. Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

Just becoming the best programmer is too hard. Becoming the best ruby programmer is hard, but not as hard. Becoming the best Ruby on Rails backend developer is a little easier. Becoming the best person at improving tests for Ruby on Rails apps is niche enough to be achievable.

It's a lot easier to be the best in a category of 10 than best in a category of 10,000.

Dual Mastery

I've found that a good way to continue refining what I do is to develop mastery in more than one thing. This is sort of specializing - Steph Ango, creator of Obsidian, calls it hybridizing:

The hybrid path means developing expertise in two or more distinct areas. Having several specialties allows you to see patterns that no one else can see, and make contributions that no one else would think of. The world needs more hybrid people.

My favorite flavor of Hybrid that Steph describes is the U-shaped hybrid, where one develops a wide base of skills with 2 specialties.

I'm still figuring out what this means for myself. I like to write backend code with Rails, but I'm also trying to develop my skills in infrastructure. I like to write code, but I also like to teach people how to write code through long-form tutorials. Fortunately, both of these paths are complimentary.

In the end, careers are long and these aren't one-way doors. I'm having fun experimenting and learning - I hope you are too.

Marketing to Developers in 2024

Jeff Morhous — Wed, 15 May 2024 01:39:23 +0000

This was originally posted on SyntaxPen's resources page.

When selling B2D (business-to-developer), it's important to build trust directly with the people using your product, Software Engineers. Developers have an outsized impact on buying decisions compared to most individual contributors. Building trust and brand with developers is hard, but it's the most sustainable way to market developer tools.

In this article, we'll talk a bit about what makes marketing to developers tricky, developer advocacy, and our favorite way to market to developers. (Hint: Educating developers is marketing to them)

Developer Advocacy as Marketing

Many developer tools (devtools) businesses look to developer advocacy to build trust with developers. Developer advocates (sometimes called developer relations or developer evangelists) are responsible for a lot of things, including:

Engaging a community of developers online
Speaking at conferences
Writing blog posts for company announcements
Writing documentation on using developer tools
Building example projects to educate and inspire potential users (developers)
Technical content creation
Attending meetups to represent the company

As you can see from the list, a good developer advocate is a developer and educator, which is a hard combination to find. Small companies that need to market to software engineers will have to pick and choose the combination of strategies from developer advocacy that fits them.

A lot of the responsibilities of developer advocates can be summed up as building trust with developers. Evergreen educational content for developers is an underrated and overpowered strategy to build a trusted brand.

Using Programming Tutorials to Educate Developers

Writing programming tutorials brings in high-value organic traffic that you can lean on to build your brand. If a software engineer searches for a problem and you can provide a solution, you've just provided tangible value. Great programming tutorials also rank for keywords that are low-difficulty and high-intent, an SEO specialist's dream.

Producing programming tutorials for this purpose is a very specific form of technical content marketing. As you produce more and more tutorials that are useful and novel, you'll generate backlinks at the same time as you build your brand authority with developers. Some of this writing should be about your business or product, but not all of it.

You can acute solve problems for software engineers with educational content while solving other problems for them with your core product. Making great content for developers takes a lot of time and experience, and writing programming tutorials is the among the hardest to get right.

Why are programming tutorials a good choice for marketing?

They provide real value to people, which brings in sustainable organic traffic
The people they attract from SEO are often developers
Useful tutorials highly-sharable
Tutorials are a no-nonsense way to share that your business can be trusted
Writing programming tutorials is scalable

Conclusion

Developers are an especially difficult profession to market to but often have a say in the purchasing decisions that affect their work. If you're making tools for developers, there's no shortcut to building your brand as a trusted solution.

Programming tutorials are a great way to educate developers, which helps you bring in traffic over the long term. A dedicated developer advocacy team can do this for your business, but they may be better utilized in building community and creating content that highlights your product. If you're ready to explore creating this kind of content, then a content marketing agency might be able to help.

Still, a traditional content marketing agency often doesn't have the expertise to do this content well. The best people to write to software developers are other software developers, so a technical content marketing agency that works with practicing software engineers is a better choice. SyntaxPen writes technical content for developers, and takes pride in perfecting the intersection of writing and software.

How to Market Developer Tools

Jeff Morhous — Sun, 05 May 2024 22:59:52 +0000

Originally posted on SyntaxPen's resources hub

The most effective way to market to developers is to genuinely give them something of value with no catch. It's not a popular answer, but marketing to developers requires a long history of building trust and reputation by giving value away to the developer community.

Understanding Who Buys Developer Tools

The first step in any marketing approach is figuring out who your customers are. So who buys developer tools?

Software Developers might not be the ones making the final purchasing decisions, but the best engineering leadership leans on developers to inform decisions that impact them. Developers have more buying power than typical individual contributors when selling B2B products.

Leaders look to developers

For a good example, consider continuous integration tools. There are a lot of really great commercial solutions on the market. Between GitHub Actions, CircleCI, SemaphoreCI, and others, there are a lot of options that can be hard to compare.

If were a technology leader, how would you decide which solution to purchase for your organization? You would probably look towards the people who will be actually using the product - your software engineers! There will be a lot of factors that go into the final decision, but without developer buy-in, it's hard for any developer tool to sell.

Developers are the ones with problems to solve

Let's look at it from another angle.

Imagine you're a developer at a young and quickly growing startup. As your product gets more users, the pressure to have a reliable and performant application grows. You may be hearing about issues with the application from your customer support team or customers themselves. You need some way to get notified of errors or performance problems in the application before your customers experience them.

As an experienced developer, you probably already know that the tool you're looking for is an application performance monitoring tool. You have a few in mind, so you pitch your leadership on the benefits of buying the tool you trust the most.

Developer tools products solve problems that developers have, so it only makes sense to market directly to them!

Helping Developers with Free Software Tools

One great way to market to developers is to build a tool hosted on your site that helps solve a common problem. Many forms of marketing call this a lead magnet.

The goal of a mini-tool like this is to bring in traffic for people experiencing a particular problem, so you can help them with their problem and build trust with them. This is an underutilized and underrated strategy, likely because it requires up-front effort to build the tool.

This tool that helps developers build and test regular expressions is a great example of a free software tool that builds trust for your brand. Regular expressions are a particularly tricky part of software development that most developers do not commit to memory. Someone working on a problem that requires them to write a regular expression might search "regular expression builder" and come across this tool, which would lead to your website.

Another simple tool that could live on your website as a lead magnet is something like this cron job explainer. Cron jobs are another tricky and uncommon software skill, so search traffic for this term is consistently high. This particular tool is a landing page for a developer tool that monitors cron jobs, which is directly related to the searcher's problem. This is a great tool for this business, as the traffic coming to the site is much more likely than the average person to be interested in the product associated with the tool.

Still, a tool you're using as a lead magnet doesn't have to be directly related to your core product. The point of offering a free tool is to build trust with developers over time.

Building Reputation with Open-Source Contributions

Another effective way to build reputation with developers is to contribute to the open-source community. Open-source software powers much of the world, and it's almost guaranteed that your own product leans on open-source software in some way.

An easy way to contribute to open-source software is to open-source some tool that your business already uses. Meta is building a huge reputation in the open-source community through open-sourcing LLAMA, their lightweight LLM. They've attracted developers to use their products, contribute to it, or even come work on it full-time as a result. Now, when considering open-source AI, Meta comes to mind for developers before the ironically named Open AI.

Another great way to contribute to the open-source community is by sponsoring projects that your company uses. GitHub Sponsors makes it easy for you to financially support projects or even contributors in a very public way.

Lastly, consider dedicating some of your own engineering time to contributing code to open-source projects. Shopify has executed this strategy very well with their contributions to Rails, building their reputation as a business that understands developers.

Building Trust by Sponsoring Conferences

Sponsoring conferences is a great way to capture developer attention and build a brand that software engineers recognize. Software engineers often go to conferences to hone their skills, and it's common that sponsors get a chance to give away swag, explain their offerings, or even recruit talent.

Sponsoring a software conference is expensive, so it makes sense to focus on a niche that applies to your product. If you know most of your potential users write React, then an Angular conference isn't a good choice.

Building Goodwill by Sponsoring Creators

While you're long-term investing in content that builds trust for your own brand, you can borrow trust from an existing creator with a sponsorship. Podcasts, Youtubers, bloggers, and even newsletters are looking for sponsors to bring in revenue for their content.

If you can find a creator who has already built a following in the niche that most aligns with your business, then it makes sense to offer to sponsor their content in exchange for advertising.

Technical Content Marketing

Writing content to bring in traffic has existed since the dawn of the internet, and has been commercialized as content marketing. Technical content marketing is the practice of creating niche content for technical audiences.

Creating original, useful technical content brings in traffic through organic search and even direct sharing. If you write something for your site that can educate developers, you can build reputation and trust while gaining high-value traffic.

Many developer tools websites are full of articles and tutorials aimed at educating software engineers. Some content is generic, while other content is about the product itself.

Still, creating great content for developers is hard. The internet is full of programming content, and generative AI is making it even harder to stand out. If you're going to write technical content to market to developers, then ensure it is unique and useful.

Conclusion

Marketing to software engineers requires a rare combination of skills in marketing and software engineering. Writing for software developers is one of the best ways to market developer tools, but it takes care to get it right.

Are you ready to invest in writing content for developers?

SyntaxPen can help, we deliver engaging tutorials and high-level pieces that educate developers across many languages and frameworks.

How to Make Great Content for Developers

Jeff Morhous — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 20:58:17 +0000

This was originally published here at SyntaxPen.

Writing for software engineers is an especially challenging niche in content creation. Businesses and individuals often want to write to a developer audience to build their brand, educate developers on their product, and bring in organic traffic. This falls in line with typical content marketing goals, but the strategy for this sort of technical writing requires a more unique approach.

I've been writing programming tutorials and other content for developers for years, and do this here at syntaxpen.

In this article, I'll explain how developer education serves as content marketing, the best-performing types of content for developers, and how to write the content that developers trust and share with their peers.

Developer Education as Content Marketing

Educating developers is a great way to write content that brings value to your business. Generally speaking, providing value to searchers (and in turn, readers) is the best way to do content marketing, but marketing to developers requires providing a lot of value.

Software engineers are busy and often live to optimize their time. When searching the web, it's often a goal for them to spend as little time as possible looking for what they need. If you want to bring in high-value, organic traffic that consists of software developers, you need to be the best place on the internet for them to click when they're searching for a given topic. This will bring in traffic, but also help your business build a trusted brand.

Over time, your content that focuses on educating developers will build your site into a trusted place where engineers know they can get reliable information. Posting only high-value, low-noise content enhances the value you provide, and people will begin to visit your site to learn, rather than end up at your site when searching for a given problem. Educating developers is the best way to provide value to them, which will in turn ensure that organic traffic to your site is equally high-value.

Writing Long-Form Tutorials That Solve Real Problems

One of the best ways to get search traffic from software developers is to write long-form programming tutorials that solve real problems.

Generic articles like "How to Code" and "Best Programming Languages" are good options, but writing extremely specific tutorials is a great way to niche down and rank in search results quickly.

The process of a developer arriving at a tutorial on your site might go something like this:

They're working on building a new feature that requires them to provide some parameters to an API call
They don't understand the documentation they're looking at. They're not sure how to provide the parameter in the way their API documentation explains it
They search Google for: "difference between parameters in URL and after URL"
They see an article that looks like it might answer their question
They read the article and it quickly solves their problem
They share it with a peer because it provided a lot of value to them

Writing programming tutorials is a great way to capture developers' attention in this way. Still, you shouldn't write these tutorial to capture traffic. You should write novel and helpful tutorials to genuinely provide value to developers searching the internet. You only get value from your traffic when you provide value to your readers.

Don't write on a topic that has already been covered comprehensively
Do write on topics that don't have adequate resources

Solving problems is hard, solving novel problems is harder. Teaching people to solve novel problems is incredibly hard to get right, so the work this kind of content requires keeps many teams from investing in it. Even so, teaching developers how to solve novel problems through long-form tutorials is a great way to provide value in an evergreen way.

Writing Informative Articles about New Developments

Another great way to write content for software developers is to write informative articles, as opposed to programming tutorials. This sort of content is often focused on new developments in languages, frameworks, or communities.

You can provide a ton of helpful information on a new release of a framework by doing some of the heavy lifting up-front. If you're early, you'll quickly build trust among developers with sharable content.

At face value, informative articles could be centered around things like "This Feature of React Was Just Released" or "Rails 6.0 is Going End of Life", but this isn't the way to make informative content great. Digging into the internals and doing explanations of technical concepts beyond duplicating announcements makes informative content stand out.

For example, if a new version of Ruby on Rails introduces a library called Solid Queue, it would be useful to write content around using that new library. Regardless of how in-depth you go, writing informative articles is a good way to make content for developers.

Keys to Great Technical Content

Writing engaging and educational content for developers is hard! There are a lot of things to get right, so here are some high-impact keys to keep top of mind.

One of the easiest ways to engage readers is to have them follow along with a project. Even if they don't complete the project, this takes them on a journey through building something. By teaching them to build something meaningful, you can readers something new.

The most underrated key is to always thoroughly explain your prerequisites. Your tutorials should contain all the information a programmer needs to complete the project. People often overlook this, and it results in readers abandoning a tutorial or leaving your site to accomplish their prerequisites. If, for example, you're writing a Python tutorial, you should explain at the very least that the project requires Python installed. If you have space, you should consider getting the user through prerequisites inside your article. Nothing is more frustrating to readers (and learners!) than unexplained prerequisites.

You should also tell your readers up front what they can expect to learn by reading your article. Some SEO specialists call this "putting value above the fold". Hook visitors to your site early by showing them what value they will get by reading.

When introducing new concepts, give your readers sufficient context and even links to keep them from having to go back to Google. Your technical articles should be a one-stop-shop for readers, providing as much value as you can.

Programming tutorials that stand out from the crowd use plenty of code examples that work well while following best practices for the given language. If you want developers to trust you, you should put extra care into ensuring quality in the programming samples you use.

The last most notable key to great technical content is to show proof that your samples work with screenshots and working demo links. Showing proof in this way is an easy way to prove your content is worth reading.

Technical Content That Stands Out from Generative AI

It's no secret that the internet is being polluted by content from generative AI. Large Language Models have given everyone the ability to produce truly massive amounts of content. Now more than ever, it's important to write content that is unique and of the highest quality.

When you're writing content for developers, don't just say things. Do things!

Don't just do things. Show the reader how to do things!

Produce interactive content like tutorials focused on niche or novel concepts. You'll have a hard time getting results from content like "How to Write a For Loop" as opposed to "How to Set up DNS for a Next.js Application Hosted on AWS".

All of the keys to great content apply when trying to stand out from AI-generated content. Use screenshots, make good code samples, and link to complete projects. Your readers will LOVE visiting your site.

Conclusion

Writing great content for developers is hard. Writing long tutorials that educate developers on how to do specific things is a great way to stand out from the crowd.

SyntaxPen does the heavy lifting of writing, reviewing, or editing technical content so your team doesn't have to become experts. If you're ready to talk about how we can help you make great technical content, we'd love to hear from you!

Software Engineers Need a Brag Doc

Jeff Morhous — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 20:56:26 +0000

A brag doc is a place where you keep track of (and ideally show off) the work you're proud of. You can call it what you want - A brag doc, personal wins, and impact list, whatever makes you feel the most comfortable sharing. Brag documents are helpful in any knowledge work career, but especially important in software engineering roles where career progress is largely connected to how well you demonstrate impact on the business.

How a brag doc helps software engineers

Maintaining a brag doc takes time, so many people are hesitant to start. There are plenty of reasons why a brag doc is worth the work. Most of these reasons point towards ways for you and your manager to avoid recency bias when thinking about your performance.

For starters, a brag document helps you remember what you did at work. This is a huge benefit to your career for a number of reasons, but a little-appreciated reason is that it gives you visibility into your time spent.

You can work ten times harder than anyone around you and it still not matter for your growth or career if you spent that energy working on the wrong things. A brag doc helps you retrospect on whether you're actually executing on things that push you towards you goals.

The second benefit is that a brag doc helps your manager (and maybe even their manager) appreciate the value you bring to the business. Whether they're thinking about your performance for review season or trying to justify a promotion, a brag document helps your leadership avoid recency bias. An organized list (we'll get to that later) of what you did and why it matters gives clear visibility into your impact, which can only help you in performance reviews and promotion committees.

How to make a brag doc as a software engineer

If you're still reading, maybe you're convinced to make and maintain a brag document. You could start by just keeping a note of all the work you've done, but putting in a little extra effort goes a long way.

As a software engineer, you can start by going to your issue tracker or version control system like Jira or Github and copying work you've completed recently. Each item should have a "what you did" along with a "why it matters". Something like "shipped this linked pr that fulfilled my team's xyz OKR" is a great general format. Half an hour spent doing this ought to yield at least a quarter's worth of work, which should give you enough space to start organizing.

The way you format your brag doc is largely dependent on your primary goal or audience, so there isn't a one-size-fits all template. Most recently, the primary purpose of my brag doc was to make it easier for my manager to advocate for my promotion.

Because of my goal, the format of my brag doc looked a lot like a promotion justification. I started tracking how the work I did aligned with the expectations outlined for the level above mine. After a year or so, I had a dense document that outlined how I was fulfilling the expectations of the role above mine, supported with links to design documents, code reviews, and pull requests.

These days I'm still sorting out the format of my brag doc, but I'm leaning towards aligning work under headers that represent goals I'm working towards for both my performance and areas I'd like to improve in.

It's just as important to track work that isn't explicitly found in a pull request or Jira ticket. Glue work like helping peers and responding to incidents is all valuable to the business, so it belongs on your brag doc. This is the hardest work to remember, so you may have to ask your peers or leadership if any work you did comes to mind as particularly helpful to them.

Conclusion

A brag doc is best done when updated regularly. Trying to do this on a yearly or even quarterly basis is playing life on hard mode. I have a regular calendar reminder to update my document every 2 weeks, which makes it pretty painless.

It's up to you to shamelessly advocate for yourself. Keeping a running list of the impact you have definitely isn't the most fulfilling work you'll do as a developer, but it might be the most valuable for your career.

Block Ads For Your Entire Home Network With A Raspberry Pi

Jeff Morhous — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 20:21:02 +0000

Updated for 2024! Run a DNS sinkhole on a Raspberry Pi, including the Raspberry Pi 5.

I got a Raspberry Pi for my birthday last year and have been suffering analysis paralysis, trying to figure out what I want to do with it.

I recently came across some open source software called Pi-hole, that boasts the ability to block ads for your entire network. Perplexed, I had to see how this worked, so here’s how I set up my Raspberry Pi to act as a black hole for all things advertisement related. Not only will you experience a (mostly) ad-free internet, but things like Smart-TV’s and other “sketchy” analytics tools won’t be able to send their data home. Hurray privacy!

If you have any questions, leave a response below or feel free to tweet me!

Step 1: Aquire Hardware 🖥

The Raspberry Pi is an incredibly cheap computer, which makes it a great candidate for such a specific task.

I have tried this on both the Raspberry Pi Model 3 Model B and the new Raspberry Pi 5. It’s wireless, so I didn’t need an adapter. However, if you buy a model without WiFi, you will need to either wire it into your router with an ethernet cable or buy a WiFi adapter. You’ll need a power supply if you don’t have one already, as well as a usb mouse and keyboard. You’ll

You’ll also need a microSD cardto store the operating system (more on that later). You’ll need an HDMI cable for the Raspberry Pi 3, or a microHDMI to HDMI cable for the Raspberry Pi 5.

Step 2: Install a Headless Operating System

The Raspberry Pi is pretty bare-bones. You can choose your operating system from a number of interesting choices based on the task you’re trying to accomplish. First, install the official Raspberry Pi imager from the website.. Given that we’re just going to run the Pi-hole software, I went with Raspbian Lite, an open source port of the Linux operating system. The lite version comes headless (with no desktop), which is perfect since we will only connect to the Pi-hole remotely. When you launch the imager, it will have you select your hardware, the operating system you’d like, and where to install it (your SD card!).

You should also customize settings to enable SSH with a password, as we’ll use that to connect to the Raspberry Pi in the next step.

When you’re done installing the operating system, you can eject the SD card and insert into into the Raspberry Pi. You can run the Pi-hole wirelessly, but if you can connect it directly to your router via ethernet you can avoid any wireless connectivity problems.

Step 3: SSH to Raspberry Pi and Install Pi-hole

You’ll first need the IP address of the Raspberry Pi. You can find this in your network settings or by running:

arp -a

If you haven’t already, now is a good time to allocate a static IP address to the Raspberry Pi in your routers settings.

To connect to the Raspberry Pi, run:

ssh YOUR.PI.IP.ADDRESS

Here, substitute the IP addres you found for your Raspberry Pi. It will prompt you for the password you configured when you installed the operating system.

Either in your Pi’s terminal or your computer’s terminal connected to the Pi via SSH, run the following command from Pi-hole’s website to install it:

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
The installer will run and ask a bunch of questions. It’s okay to choose the defaults, but feel free to customize like I did.

When the installer finishes it’ll show you the password it selected. Note this and copy it, then change the web dashboard password by executing:

pihole -a -p

Step 5: Configure Devices or Router

Now that your Pi-hole is acting as a DNS server, we need to make sure that your devices use it instead of your ISP. You can do this on a per-device basis, but I’d recommend changing it at your router. That way, every time a device on your network makes a DNS request, it will first go through the Pi-hole.

This step is very specific to the brand of router, so I won’t go into detail. Essentially you need to tell your router to treat your Pi-hole as a DNS server, rather than your ISP. You should also reserve a static IP address for your Pi to ensure it’s IP does not change because this would break your setup.

And Voila, enjoy your ad-free internet! 🙌

How Pi-hole Blocks Ads

Normal Ad-Blockers allow advertisements to load and just hide them from your view. Once you’ve gotten the Pi-hole up and running, advertisements will stop dead in their tracks, before they even begin to download.

Pi-hole is a very specific DNS sinkhole. DNS stands for Domain Name System, and it is the protocol for connecting names (like medium.com) to IP addresses, which is where websites/servers really live on the internet.

A DNS sinkhole acts in place of your usual DNS provider to provide false results. This pretty much breaks your internet — NEAT! With Pi-hole, everything that isn’t an Ad gets forwarded to your DNS provider, but if the domain name is in Pi-hole’s blacklist (which is customizable for the nerdiest among you), then the Pi-hole sends back a fake IP address.

So you visit a website and it loads. Next, the website asks its ad provider for ads, and Pi-hole says “What ad provider? That doesn’t exist.” And boom your ads are gone. This can actually speed up your network, as you won’t be using as much bandwidth.

An interesting note is that Pi-hole won’t kill youtube ads, as youtube serves its content and advertisements from the same DNS, so killing youtube ads would also kill youtube.

Forem: Jeff Morhous

Writing Technical Content That Stands Out From AI

Table of Contents

Focusing on Developer Education

Producing Interactive Content

Writing about New Developments

Using Images and Graphs

Leveraging AI Tools

Using a Technical Content Marketing Agency

Top 10 Keys to Reviewing Technical Content

Teach the Reader Something Useful

Write a Meaningful Introduction

Validate Code Samples

Ensure Samples Should Follow Best Practices

Code Dependencies Should be Up to Date

Great Content Needs Great Links

Deliver Value as Quickly as Possible

Use Screenshots to Keep Readers Engaged

Have a Working Demo Project

Ensure Educational Content is Clear

Conclusion

The Ultimate Guide to Refreshing Programming Tutorials

Why You Should Refresh Your Programming Tutorials

Updating Language and Library Versions

Updating Screenshots

Updating Links

Optimizing for a Great Tutorial

Optimizing for SEO

Conclusion

Technical Content Marketing for Brand Awareness

Understanding The Devtools Marketing Audience

Choosing the Right Topics for Brand Awareness

Crafting Effective Technical Content

Optimizing for SEO and Readability

Showcasing Your Brand's Unique Value

Conclusion

Effectively Marketing Devtools with Educational Content

Some Devtools Marketing Challenges

Writing Educational Content for Technical Audiences

Conclusion

How a Technical Content Marketing Agency Works

How Content Marketing Works

What Makes Technical Content Hard

Developers Trust Content Written by Developers

Doing Technical Content In-House vs Freelancers vs Agencies

Different Technical Content Services

Conclusion

Redefining Career Specialization

Specialist vs Generalist

Keep Redefining What You Do

Dual Mastery

Marketing to Developers in 2024

Developer Advocacy as Marketing

Using Programming Tutorials to Educate Developers

Conclusion

How to Market Developer Tools

Understanding Who Buys Developer Tools

Leaders look to developers

Developers are the ones with problems to solve

Helping Developers with Free Software Tools

Building Reputation with Open-Source Contributions

Building Trust by Sponsoring Conferences

Building Goodwill by Sponsoring Creators

Technical Content Marketing

Conclusion

How to Make Great Content for Developers

Developer Education as Content Marketing

Writing Long-Form Tutorials That Solve Real Problems

Writing Informative Articles about New Developments

Keys to Great Technical Content

Technical Content That Stands Out from Generative AI

Conclusion

Software Engineers Need a Brag Doc

How a brag doc helps software engineers

How to make a brag doc as a software engineer

Conclusion

Block Ads For Your Entire Home Network With A Raspberry Pi

Step 1: Aquire Hardware 🖥

Step 2: Install a Headless Operating System

Step 3: SSH to Raspberry Pi and Install Pi-hole