Dev Writer's Workshop

This is a writing workshop that contains all the readings and exercises from swyx and michelle's Dev Writer's Retreat in Miami.

It is comprised of 4 modules (based on the 4 days) that each have resources and exercises. Parts of it were recorded and now available on YouTube.

Module 1

This module is focused on getting ideas for writing, trying to flesh out what you're good at, and some general resources on dev writing.

Module 1 Readings

Short Reads

• The Day You Became A Better Writer: One of the most widely cited short pieces of writing advice
• Five Ways to Write Like The Economist: Not as impressive: but has 5 Immediately applicable tactics and is itself well written. (Summary)
• 10 years of professional blogging – what I’ve learned: Andrew Chen blogged his way to the top of Silicon Valley.
• The Most Successful Email I Ever Wrote: Derek Sivers’ classic email shows how you can add delight to a mundane purchase confirmation
• How to Write Funny: More ideas on engaging, entertaining writing.
• “What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?” Note the qualitative differences between an “average” blogpost and the ones that people remember. Write to last.

Longer Reads

• Building A Second Brain - Book, Notes, PARA system
• The Craft of Writing Effectively - 1.5hr talk, summary
• Ship 30 for 30: How to Start Writing Online
• Julian Shapiro’s Writing Handbook

Module 1 Exercises

1. ​What is one tech (large or small) that has changed your life?
2. ​What are you weirdly expert about outside of work?
3. ​What blogpost or article is permanently stuck in your head?

Module 2

This module is focused on thoughtleading, writing formats, and SEO.

Module 2 Readings

• How to thought lead
• Professional Blogging

Idea tier list

• S tier: do interesting things offline and announce them or topics that will be popular no matter what
• A tier: provide insights and state quotable opinions (thought-leading)
• B tier: doing work for others - aggregating content, making a newsletter, or analyzing other people's work
• C tier: self-serving, all the rest of the content that people usually tell you to do when you're trying to write

Writing formats

• Straightforward but address the primary concern
• The Guide to Remote Work That Isn't Trying to Sell You Anything
• How to Get Rich (without getting lucky)
• How to Market Yourself (without Being a Celebrity)
• Superlatives: An interesting story about the first/last/best/worst experience when you did X. You see a lot of these in Rachelbythebay's work. Mtlynch focuses more on documenting his journey semi-realtime.
• Data & News: This is a lot of work but collect data for yourself and publish it for others and others will find that useful.
  • This is the strategy I am adopting for AI stuff.
  • Dan Luu does this a lot to back up his work https://danluu.com/
  • Performance porn always
  • The cutting edge of data is news, and you can see this on Gergely's substack but you're basically a journalist at that point
• How $POPULAR_THING Works: This is Fly.io's and Alex Xu's strategy
• Listicle works well :).. but an organized listicle is an overview
  • Overviews: What your part of the dev ecosystem looks like to you. It'll never be perfect, it can't be. Some folks on HN will tear you to shreds for missing something obvious. But it will be immensely helpful to people just behind you in experience. See: How I write backends, The evolution of the data engineer, and my AWS vs Cloudflare post. Overviews become "Insights" when you can successfully reframe something in a new light that is useful for people to understand what is going on.
  • Predictions/Wishlists: What is missing from your part of the ecosystem. The complement of the above. You can also invert it into a complaint post, like this or this but those are less constructive if entertaining
  • Principles: Timeless things, a superset of the previous two points. See rauchg (Nextjs co-creator) and dan abramov (react core team)
  • "Beat up the biggest guy in the prison" https://stratechery.com/2013/clayton-christensen-got-wrong/
  • Meme
  • https://www.swyx.io/cfp-advice#pick-a-genre

Module 2 Exercises

1. Microcopy Exercise from Philip Kiely
2. Come up with 3 article ideas, and write 3 titles each

Module 3

This module is focused on styles of writing, getting inspiration for your writing, and editing.

Module 3 Readings

General Resources

• David Perell - Make it POP
• Gary Provost - This Sentence Has Five Words
• Paul Graham - How to Write Usefully (importance + novelty + correctness + strength)
• Ahmed Soliman - Writing tools I learned from The Economist
• William Deresiewicz - Solitude and Leadership
• Julia Evans - Write A Brag Document
• Rachel Kroll - RachelByTheBay (see: Duck)
• Antonio García Martínez - Gonzo style
• Public Narrative - Obama, Bezos, Musk, Tenev
• Build a Swipe File of your mentors

Editing Resources

• Write at night and edit in the morning
• Read your work on your phone
• Read your work out loud
• Delete everything except the first sentence of each paragraph (only for standard nonfiction)
• Poynter - 20 questions to ask
• Peer Editing
• The 4 Types of Editing
• Feedback frameworks: ABCD and CRIBS
• Holly Morris - Keep Your Writers Happy
• Tools
• Hemingway
• Grammarly
• Foster.co

Extra Resources

• Dan Luu on developer writing styles
• Strunk & White and a critique of it
• How to Write More Clearly
• Writing English as a Second Language
• Go through the Writing Excuses backlog
• (requires $1 subscription) NYT Copy Edit quizzes

Module 3 Exercises

1. You are giving a speech introducing yourself and your company/cause. Write a Public Narrative - story of us, story of you, story of now - to convert complete strangers into fans, customers, and employees. Public Narrative - Obama, Bezos, Musk, Tenev
2. Look over some of your blog posts and edit using one of the following frameworks: ABCD or CRIBS
3. Write a GPT3-assisted article about Kubernetes and Pizza on OpenAI!

Module 4

Module 4 Readings

• Visuals
  • The difference between Not illustrated vs Illustrated
  • Visualizations - start simple, then upgrade your hits. Version control in Excalidraw (v1.0, v1.1). Jack Butcher (Visualize Value)
  • Illustrations - Andrew Yu, Maggie Appleton (How to Draw the Invisible), Annie Bombanie, Julia Evans (programming comics), Lin Clark, Tomomi Imura, Wait But Why, More To That
  • Code Samples - Samantha Ming, Addy Osmani, Una Kravets
  • Mocks - Inputs, Redesigns, Demos, Microinteractions
  • Equations - Addy Osmani, Romeen Sheth
  • Screenshot Essay - Day1, Eric Stromberg
  • Memes - Mark Dalgleish, Kitze, dedicated meme accounts (IAmDevloper)
• Copywriting and Content repurposing
  • The Hub+Spoke Content Strategy of 100k+ follower B2B creators
  • The Particle/Wave Duality Theory of Knowledge
  • Writing Infra: data repos - Spark Joy, Stable Diffusion, React + TypeScript
  • Most things from Neville Madhora
• Tactics
  • Half life of social media posts
  • Hacker News: Guide, Mtlynch’s course. Post at 12pm EST
  • Twitter: Post Monday-Wednesday 9am EST
  • Product Hunt: 12.01 am PT
  • Youtube’s Algorithm Explained
• SEO
  • Monica’s 17 Link Building Strategies for Startups and Developers
  • Technical SEO: The Definitive Guide
  • Lean SEO: Framework for SEO Traction
  • SEO for devs course
  • Blogging for devs course
• Newsletters: Substack (Gergely + advice, Alex Xu, PackyM), Convertkit (Nathan Barry, Starting advice), Every.to
• Longer reads from the Coding Career Handbook
  • Marketing Yourself (without Being a Celebrity) - pdf, blog, talks/pods
  • Developer Guide to Twitter - secret link! use Twemex to study top tweets
    • More:
      • How to Twitter Effectively
      • Getting Senpai to Notice You
      • How I'd build a Twitter network from scratch
      • Dickie Bush’s Twitter Strategy
      • Twitter Inspiration Handbook
      • Joining the inner circle
      • Everyone Can Build a Twitter Audience

Module 4 Exercises

1. Visualize/Illustrate 1-3 of your articles/ideas, using Excalidraw, tldraw.com, or other tool of choice. If you need inspiration, illustrate someone else's essay!
2. Schedule 3 social media posts promoting the same article, on Typefully or Buffer. Do not repeat yourself. Use your visuals if it helps!
3. Start a newsletter (Revue, Substack, Convertkit, Buttondown. Hashnode has basic newsletter functionality as well). If you have one already, take some tactics from the reading and apply them for your next issue.
4. Start a writing infra repo. Add timeline, reference list, key tools, list communities, recommended reads.