I haven’t been a technical writer for very long. I started writing when I signed up for my gold digger account:

One year and one month until today (February 23, 2021), the harvest of this year has exceeded my expectations:

  1. Output more than 40 blog posts, a total of hundreds of thousands of words
  2. Nuggets outstanding writer, Nuggets annual popular author No.27
  3. Sifu 2020 “Top Writer”, wan Fan columnist
  4. Outstanding source creator of open source China, Top20 annual active bloggers of source creation program

This article would like to make a review of this process, and share my summarized writing skills and promotion strategies.

Why write

Think about why writing is important before you write! Because your initial thoughts will determine which direction you go and the quality of what you write.

The reason for my writing is very simple. I have been doing front-end business for several years, and most of the time I have been writing business code. There has been no great breakthrough in technology. In order not to let a few years of work experience become “a copy of the first year’s work experience,” I decided to go further and systematically learn the next front end. So for me, writing is my learning method, my primary purpose is to learn knowledge, the community reputation that writing brings is only incidental, of course, there is no need to deliberately brush.

“Write for Learning” and “Write for Fame”

In my observation, there are two main types of writers writing in the community: “writing for learning” and “writing for fame”.

Most of the best bosses actually “write for learning”, that is, they see some interesting, novel technology, go to learn, and naturally summarize the article. Or feel that a knowledge point is very easy to make mistakes, want to output their own views, to help everyone avoid the pit, will write their own opinions into an article, this process although the author is more output content, but the writing process will also strengthen the author’s own understanding, in fact, is also a learning method. I personally believe that writing for learning is the right way and the direction of the community.

Of course, there are also a few authors who want to get more attention in a short time and deliberately cater to the taste of readers, that is, “write for brush reputation”. A typical example of this is that the Nuggets were at one point dominated by a lot of interview questions. We go out the interview back to share the result is actually a good thing, but deliberately to collect the interview questions, similar content sent over and over again, the inside of the answer is wrong, even leads to the community is more and more utilitarian, interview questions the version on the low quality and high quality technical articles but no chance to show, resulting in the phenomenon of bad money drive out good. I remember there was a writer at that time who had racked up three or four thousand hits in a short time by repeatedly Posting test questions, and was almost on the verge of becoming an “excellent author”. As a result, he was accused by a community leader and then hardly showed up. In this way, the front brush thousands of reputation is not in vain? Nuggets officials have since cracked down on the poor quality of interview essays, and the situation is much better now.

So I say, want to know before writing “write for learning” and “writing for brush reputation” is very important, if it is “to learn and write”, then you can write your own comments, write high quality articles, if pure is “write for brush reputation”, may a little short-term gains, but there may be bosses Dui, by the official regulation, unthreatening.

What to write

Before I started this systematic learning program, I hadn’t really written much about technology, or even wandered around the tech community. Usually, if I need to learn something, such as React, I will go to its official website and read all its documents. Now the documents of these popular libraries are very well written, so I can get used to them after reading them. If you still don’t know how to use it, go to the company to see if it has been used before. If the company has not used it, go to GitHub to find it, and then copy and modify it. This process usually takes only a few days, and complex libraries can be up and running in a week or two at most. Use Google when you have a problem, and you will find the answer on Stack Overflow.

My working pattern for the first few years was basically like this, and it didn’t matter how I handled the work, but the first year was like this, the second year was like this, and the NTH year was like this… It became “one year work experience reuse N years”, became a veritable “API engineer”, do the project no problem, ask the principle of deja vu, but say not quite clear. If this is always the case, the technology will always be in the same place, in the current unit is easy to be replaced, go out to find a job may also hit a wall everywhere, or find to find always with the current almost, it is difficult to achieve a big breakthrough.

I feel like I’ve hit a brick wall. I want to break through this bottleneck, but I don’t know how! When you don’t have a specific direction, look at what you can do with your hands. Start with something simple and visible. So, I decided, I want to reorganize their knowledge framework, those only seem to be similar technology, principle all thoroughly, so I found a “front-end knowledge architecture map” from the Internet, decided to follow the outline inside, all learn again. However, I cannot simply read books, read blogs and watch videos for learning again. I have done such things before. As a front-end with several years of working experience, I have higher requirements for myself: All knowledge points I have learned must be consolidated in articles. All framework learning, must learn the principle or source level!

So, the answer to the “what to write” question already exists: Learn the front-end knowledge architecture and write the learning process into an essay.

How to write

As mentioned above, I actually don’t have much writing experience. The last time I wrote was a college paper. Before that, I wrote a high school essay. But technical writing is not the same as ordinary composition, generally do not need gorgeous rhetoric, it is more important to explain the problem clearly, read the technical article readers need is to learn technical knowledge, rather than look at the wind, snow and moon, so the logic of technical articles, step by step, from shallow to deep, good understanding is actually more important. I did not know how to write at the beginning, and I was also in the continuous writing project. As I wrote, I summarized. Generally speaking, my own articles were divided into several stages:

  1. Just take a note
  2. Have their own understanding of the knowledge point analysis
  3. In-depth source code, explore the principle
  4. Summarize from work

Just take a note

Since elementary school, teachers have asked you to take notes, and I think you can do it, and that’s the easiest place to start. When I first started, I didn’t know how to write articles, but mostly I took notes, like various CSS centering schemes, which I learned somewhere else, and wrote them down, just notes. For “CSS in the middle” this kind of question, the interview ask rotten, online information is also a lot of, this article is not much, so not many people. In fact, for “note-taking”, it is easy to understand less attention, because what you write is notes, that is to say, you also learn from other places, the whole idea of the article is actually somebody else, if their note-taking level is not high, may write out the effect is not as good as the original article.

Have their own understanding of the knowledge point analysis

After writing a few “note-taking” articles, I found that they didn’t work. Not only did they get little attention, but they didn’t even help me. I began to realize that the essence of this phenomenon is that what you write is a note, the core ideas are from others, or you put them together by yourself, and the whole article has no logic of your own, no own opinions. Therefore, I began to try to add my own opinions into the article. At that time, there happened to be some friends in the group who did not have a thorough understanding of “JS prototype chain”. Although there were many similar articles on the Internet, many of them explained “what is prototype chain” from the surface, and the drawings were also very complicated, which was not easy to understand. So I try to write an article on the prototype chain, because I know he can achieve “object-oriented” characteristics, that is how many other articles are not mention, but it is the designer may want to achieve the effect of initial, hence I analogy Java object-oriented, tells the story from the perspective of object-oriented prototype chain effect and the meaning of his existence, it is this: Easy to understand object orientation in JS, and understand prototype and __proto__. This article was featured on the nuggets front page and eventually got more than 200 likes and more than 10,000 views, which made me realize that “explaining knowledge points with my own understanding” might be more popular in the Nuggets.

After that, I began to consciously add my own insights into the knowledge structure. That for a knowledge point, how to produce their own opinions? This requires asking yourself a few more questions as you study! For example, when LEARNING HTTPS, I asked myself a question: “Is HTTPS possible to be cracked? If I’m a hacker and I want to break HTTPS, what are the ways and means?” With that in mind, I talked about HTTPS from the point of view of “cracking HTTPS.” This article was recommended and received more than 100 likes and thousands of views.

After tasting some sweetness, I paid more attention to ask myself questions in learning and added my own understanding. Sometimes WHEN I learn something that others don’t, I can add my own insights and write articles from this perspective. For example, a video course on THE JS event loop says, “setImmediate executes before setTimeout.” I can’t think of a situation where setTimeout beats setImmediate, but I can’t recall the exact situation. So I took the time to get to the bottom of the problem and the mechanics, and wrote my own article, setTimeout versus setImmediate, which gives you a thorough understanding of the Event Loop. The post received more than 100 likes and thousands of views

In-depth source code, explore the principle

The JS knowledge system is huge, but it is ultimately limited, and I soon wrote a dozen JS articles, including memory management, shallow copy, object oriented (prototype chain), this pointing, event loop, variable type, scope and so on. These have covered the main knowledge of JS, JS I have been difficult to find a new point to write articles.

So my articles turned to the framework I used, the React stack, which I’ve been using for the last few years. So I plan to reorganize and learn the React stack, not its usage, after all, I have used it for several years, the usage is already familiar, this time I will learn their source code and principle. Source code and principle relative to JS knowledge and framework use method is much more difficult, the audience is much smaller, for readers is also difficult to produce direct benefits. Because readers may see a JS knowledge, go out the interview can deal with most of the JS interview, in addition to some giant, also not every company will be asked the source code, and the popular open source libraries is to try and write you Daniel, it brings together various advanced usage of JS, all kinds of advanced programming thought and design patterns, So even if I tried to be as simple as POSSIBLE, it would still be more difficult to read than other articles. So this kind of article in nuggets won praise and reading is not considerable, I have a large number of source code analysis are only thirty or forty praise, which is about half of my thick face for friends and colleagues point (this I will say later in the promotion).

For authors, writing a source class article requires reading the source code of the framework, which can be time-consuming. I write a JS knowledge point of the article, because things are familiar to me, may be done in a few days, finished will have hundreds of praise. But the source code analysis of a complex framework, such as express.js, I need to read and debug the source code a little bit, and it may take two or three weeks to write and still only have 30 or 40 likes after writing. In terms of community prestige growth, it’s very cheap! But I have never given up on this kind of article, and now it has become my main writing direction. Why is that? Because you have to break out of your comfort zone, explore the unknown, and eventually learn and grow! This really goes back to the question posed at the beginning of the article: “Why are you writing about technology?” For me, this is how I learn, so if I can learn something and feel growth in the process, I will keep doing it, even if it is cheap in other ways! In addition, my source code articles, although not very good response in nuggets, but in other platforms, such as Sifu, also can, so in fact there is a return.

Ok, having said so much about why to write source code parsing, now let’s talk about how to write source code parsing. As MENTIONED, before I became a technical writer, I knew very little about source code. I was an “API engineer,” and I had no idea where to start. Later I disturbed to break their psychological barriers, after many attempts to find a look at the source of the routine. In fact, again 🐂 framework or library essence is JS code, so we can use a simple way to read, this is actually we often use the method. Imagine a scenario where a long-running project in your company has a problem and your boss asks you to investigate. Since you were not involved in the project before, and now you are asked to solve the BUG, do you have to repeat the problem, find the relevant code block, debug the code and find the cause of the BUG, and then fix it? When we look at the source code, we can use a similar idea to see, first narrow down, just look at the core code of the library. For example, the core usage of koa.js is this:

const Koa = require('koa');
const app = new Koa();

app.use(async ctx => {
  ctx.body = 'Hello World';
});

app.listen(3000);
Copy the code

Just think of it as an old project that you need to work on now. In order to understand its logic, look at the API exposed in this code and debug it one by one. There are really only three apis for these lines of code:

  1. Koaclass
  2. app.useInstance methods
  3. app.listenInstance methods

Take some time to find these three apis in the source code and see how they are implemented. As you look at them, strip out the main logic and implement them yourself, while writing down the process. Once you understand all three API implementations, a source code parsing article will come out, and you can also produce a mini-version of Koa: handwritten koa.js source code.

Summarize from work

In fact, many companies are not technology-driven, technology is only a means to achieve business, which causes many companies to copy and modify a project from another project can be used, many people (including me) in this environment for a long time, slowly become “API engineers”, the most familiar with CV method. But in fact, every company’s business has its own uniqueness in some aspects, otherwise it will not survive. When implementing these complex businesses, sometimes we will use some interesting methods, and sometimes we may spend a lot of time to implement them, but then slowly forget. In fact, we can also summarize the work with certain technical content, and then write an article, and gradually settle down to become our own technology. I’ve compiled three articles from my work, some of which were well received:

  1. Speed up hundreds of times, remember a data structure in the actual work of the application
  2. Cross-project component sharing using Mono-repo
  3. Crooked performance optimization: magic change tripartite library source code, performance improved dozens of times!

To promote

As the saying goes, “Good wine needs no bush.” However, this does not apply to the current Internet era, which is an era of information explosion. If there is no appropriate promotion, even if your content is good, it will eventually be submerged in the flood of information. The promotion of good content is a win-win-win for the community, readers and authors.

For the community, if there is a lot of quality content available to readers, word of mouth will be good, and readers will want to stay in the community for a long time to learn, and may actively recommend to their friends. So a big part of the editor’s job in many communities is to proactively find good content and push it out to as many users as possible.

For readers, the promotion of good content can learn more than being dominated by low-quality content all day long.

For authors, the promotion of good content can get more attention, gain more reputation in the community and stimulate creative enthusiasm, thus forming positive incentives and producing more high-quality content.

But promotion has a very big premise: the content of promotion must be high quality content, otherwise it will have the opposite effect.

Therefore, IN my technical writing, I also tried a variety of promotion methods and channels. Different methods have different effects. The main methods I used are as follows:

  1. All kinds of QQ group, wechat group to share
  2. Ask your friends and colleagues to like you
  3. Ask community editors for recommendations
  4. Multi-platform publishing
  5. Cross-referencing
  6. Operate wechat official accounts

Here are the details:

The premise of promotion is high quality

Before promotion, we must ensure that you promote the quality of the content, at least if you write attentively, maybe you are just a beginner, can not write profound content, but you write content must be you write attentively, to let readers feel your sincerity. The more you promote, the more people will know that what you wrote is not good and insincere, which may lead to many people writing insults. Just like the example mentioned at the beginning, if you just try to piece together the content and promote it in a large number in order to “brush the reputation”, your reputation may rise quickly, but at the same time, you will let a large number of people know that your writing is not good, not sincere, and may even be defaced by the big guy.

QQ group, wechat group sharing

When I started to write articles, I liked to share them with some QQ groups and wechat groups after finishing, but the effect was not good. It is often shared to a group of hundreds of people, and then I go to see it later. The number of views increases by hundreds, but no likes are given. Of course, it may also be that my early “note type” article quality is not high, so the praise is not much, such as the above mentioned various CSS center scheme, I shared to a lot of groups, finally more than three thousand read, but only thirty to praise… So NOW I have basically not disorderly share, the income is too low, but also may be regarded as advertising was rejected.

Ask your friends and colleagues to like you

This article is mainly aimed at the nuggets platform, because nuggets of praise can be upgraded to level 4 is “excellent author”, can be automatically on the home page. So I will share with good colleagues and classmates after nuggets release, because the relationship is very good, they will basically help click 👍. But this part of the old iron man is not many, a total of a dozen.

Ask community editors for recommendations

This is actually a promotion channel with the best effect. You can contact the community editor and send the link of the written article to him. After the review, the editor will recommend it to the community home page if he thinks it is ok, which will greatly increase the exposure. Take nuggets as an example, I usually recommended the first page of the article, at least there will be more than ten likes, read at least hundreds of thousands. Plus the likes of my friends in front of me, my article will have at least 30 likes, plus the conversion of reading capacity, an article will have at least 40 to 50 digs. For a period of time, I used this as the benchmark to calculate there: I can write 100 more can be 4 levels, ha ha 😃 of course, if something goes wrong, a certain article gets hundreds of likes, will greatly speed up the process.

Other communities, such as Sifu, Open Source China, find editor recommendation effect is also very good, they have author recommendation group, you can contact the editor to add group, good content can be sent to the group for recommendation.

Multi-platform publishing

In fact, there are a lot of Chinese communities. I started writing articles in Nuggets, but the platform with the most fans is Sifu, with nearly 2,000 personal fans and more than 10,000 column fans. So after you write your article, you can publish it to multiple platforms, and maybe what’s not popular on one platform is popular on another. At present, for me, the effect is good platform: Nuggets, Sifu, Open Source China and blog Park, the following I will elaborate on the characteristics of these platforms:

The Denver nuggets

The most notable feature of Digg is the level system, with a level of 4 unlocking achievements: Digg good writers and their posts will automatically appear on the front page, which will greatly increase exposure. In addition, editors are very responsible and will actively seek out quality content to recommend to the front page, so if you continue to output quality content, it is possible to be recommended.

Think no

One of the biggest features of Sifu is that its followers grow quickly, because when new users sign up for Sifu, they will recommend some columns and writers for their attention. If you are active enough, you can be included in this recommendation list. Sifu also evaluates “Top Writer” every year, 15 people a year, because the quota is small, so it is more difficult than the “outstanding Writer” of nuggets. If you are evaluated as “Top Writer”, there will be a period of traffic support, and the number of fans will rise faster. In addition, the technical team is also very responsible, what questions in the group feedback can be answered soon, sometimes the CEO will personally reply 👍.

Open source in China

Open source Chinese traffic is also good, if recommended on the home page, at least there will be one thousand two thousand reading. In addition, he also has a “wonderful blog” section on the front page of his blog site, which can hang for a long time. The speed has increased by hundreds of times. Remember the application of data structure in practical work was published by me on January 6th, and it has been ranked first in this column for more than a month until today, February 23rd. The number of individual readings has been rising, and has reached 47,000.

And the same article I also published to the nuggets, only 30 to praise, the effect is very general, so the release of multiple platforms or good, this platform is not popular, another platform may be popular.

Blog garden

The biggest feature of blog park is that you can choose to go on the home page when publishing, of course, if you are not good quality, or may be removed by the editor, I have been removed before. Because you can decide to go to the home page, the home page of the blog park is refreshed quickly and will be submerged in a short time. Therefore, the reading volume of a single article is not high, maybe only one or two hundred. But if you can get a special recommendation from the editor to show up at this location, traffic is ok:

I have two articles recommended by the editor, the most one has nearly ten thousand views, and the least one has three or four thousand. This position can only stay for one day, so it is actually not bad.

In addition, I have also tried CSDN, Zhihu, Tencent Cloud community, etc., but the effect is not very good, so the operation has stopped. We can release as many platforms as possible in the early stage, and then focus on which platform has a good effect. If the effect is not good, we can give up, because too many operating platforms will also cost a lot of energy, so choose cost-effective ones.

Cross-referencing in articles

Because my writing is systematic, one article B may use the knowledge of the previous article A, so I will quote article A in article B, so that readers may follow to read article A. This has a certain effect. Sometimes articles written a long time ago get likes. That’s how they come about.

Operate wechat official accounts

After I wrote for a period of time, there will be a friend to give me a message, I hope to reprint to the wechat public number, this situation encountered a few times, I was thinking, why don’t I own a public number, so I opened a public number to attack the big front. I heard that wechat official account can also make money, maybe I can make some extra money, so far there is a little income:

  1. My wife gave me five of the seven dollars I earned
  2. The advertising revenue was 1.84 yuan

This income is really a little 😜, mainly because I operate compared Buddha, hair content is mainly original, fans are not many, new fans are mainly the advertising behind the article and other number of main forwarding brought. Advertising I only put the end of the advertisement, the advertisement did not put, for fear of affecting the user experience.

There was a time when I also thought about whether to operate vigorously and forward and update the content every day, but it takes a lot of time to find and review the content every day. My current focus is on learning and original content, so I left it at that. The Buddhist department is running it.

conclusion

This article summarizes and shares my experience in technical writing this year, reviews this year, and also hopes to provide a reference for friends who want to develop in this field. Here is a brief summary of the content:

  1. The purpose of technical writing is best to learn and share, not to brush up on fame.
  2. You can write about:
    1. Simple study notes: Because they are simple notes about others, they may not work very well
    2. Have their own understanding of the knowledge point analysis: have their own opinions, but also a certain degree of difficulty, but not obscure, wide audience, easy to be popular in the community.
    3. Principle and source code analysis: the content is difficult, the audience is slightly small, not necessarily popular in the community, but very useful for their growth.
    4. Summary from work: focus on summarizing valuable technical content in work, rather than being a simple “API engineer”, complete technical precipitation in work, kill two birds with one stone.
  3. Moderate promotion is a win-win-win for the community, readers and authors, but the promotion content must be of high quality, otherwise it may have the opposite effect. General promotion means include:
    1. All kinds of group sharing: the effect is not good, often the number of reading increased hundreds, no likes
    2. Share with friends and colleagues: Useful early on to ensure a few likes, but the number is limited.
    3. Community editor recommendation: the most useful way, can greatly improve exposure, but the quality must pass the line.
    4. Multi-platform release: after writing an article can try to send to multiple platforms, perhaps this platform is not the fire of another platform.
    5. In-article cross-referencing: this has the effect of allowing articles written long ago to still get a little exposure.
    6. Operating wechat public account: it is said that it can make money, but I am a Buddhist operation, the total income is less than 10 yuan.

Finally, thank you for your reading and thumbs up!

Thank you for your forwarding!

Thanks for the support of digijin, Sifu, Open Source China, Blog Park and other platforms!

Your support has always been my motivation to continue to create!

Welcome to follow my public numberThe big front end of the attackThe first time to obtain high quality original ~

“Front-end Advanced Knowledge” series:Juejin. Cn/post / 684490…

“Front-end advanced knowledge” series article source code GitHub address:Github.com/dennis-jian…