The perks of writing on Medium as a software engineer
I started writing on Medium just a few days ago. Up until this time I have attempted to post articles on topics that I find interesting, mostly related to software engineering. In all my attempts, I eventually ended up deleting the drafted article with a though that it has many flaws, and there are people in community who already covered or can cover the subject better than I do.
Recently, a friend of mine asked me if I could review her posts and I accepted to help her. Reading through her articles, irrespective of some imperfections, the content was good and taught me a few new things. She shared that writing articles, helped her investigate the regarding subjects in depth and discover some aspects that she didn’t even know existed. This has inspired me to publish my Exploring practical aspects of null checking in Kotlin and Mutating keyword in Swift articles and in this article I will try to share how writing on Medium can help you too.
1. You learn a lot by writing.
Once you find a topic that is both interesting to you and you believe will be interesting to people in the engineering community, you may start by defining what you want to deliver and form the structure of the article. This step can help you analyze what you have in your hand and what information you should be collecting to complete the article.
While we teach, we learn. — Seneca
Usually, before writing an article I try to do thorough research — read through existing articles on the topic, available documentation, StackOverflow questions and answers, issues from respective git repositories, etc. This step is fundamental to write a quality article and I suggest you spend enough time on this as well. At the end of this step, you will realize that you have a better understanding of the topic.
If the article requires code examples, you can continue by developing them next. For example, I created an Xcode Playground where I wrote and tested the example code for my previous article. In these playgrounds try to write code the context of the article in mind evaluating readability, memory, performance, and scalability implications on the mind.
Try to write on a topic that you have a good background in, but also enough room for improvement. This way in every publishing you will learn something new and this will help you to keep a steady motivation.
2. You improve your writing and delivery
Once you have formed the basic skeleton of the article, collected background information, and created code samples, you can organize these in relevant sections of the article. Now that you have the building blocks of the article, just like lego blocks are built together to form a model of an object, you need to combine these in the best way which can deliver a valuable message to the user. Once I finish with the first draft of the article, you need to take some time, have some tea or a coffee and go through it many times until you are sure that all your ideas are clear from the readers’ point of view.
The more you write, the better you get at writing, and the easier it becomes to deliver messages, and the less time you spend on your delivery.
Side note: A route to conference talks/meetups
I have previously organized a meetup on Flutter in the bank I work with a limited audience of 50 people. Although I spent a lot of time on its preparation, I realized there are many problems with my delivery even with small audience like this. Since then I didn’t manage to organize another talk where I could deliver better. However, working on my writing skills I feel like that my presentation skills are getting sharpened.
3. The reaction of the community boosts your confidence
The reaction of the community to even small contribution like articles is invaluable. For example, an article I published a few days ago has been featured in one of the Android Newsletters. The more you write on topics that interest your community, the more reads you get which is a great motivation for a writer. On Medium, the community also appreciates publishers with claps. An article may get multiple claps (up to 50) from a reader. Getting many claps in return for your work may indicate that you are on the right track.
4. You create your personal brand
Writing often and regularly may not only increase your knowledge, improve your writing and presentation skills, and boost your confidence but also help you form a personal brand. The content you build represents yourself. If the quality of the content is high and people can really benefit from your articles, your popularity within the community will grow, which will also affect other aspects of your life. For example, if you are working on an open-source project, you will have a reach to a broader segment of the community as a result of which more engineers may be interested in contributing to your project. Or if there is a conference related to what you are interested in, you may hold better chances of getting an invitation to be a speaker.
Writing a high-quality article takes a lot of time, energy, motivation, and devotion. It may also reflect your opinion, showcase your understanding, and validate your knowledge on a respective topic you write on. For example, this article reflects my opinion on writing as a software engineer.
Final words
Although this article is to encourage software engineers to write on Medium, it should not discourage you if writing is not your thing. There are many alternatives to writing such as creating and contributing to open source projects, organizing meetups, conferences, and hackathons, as well as, podcasting and engineering vlogs. Try some of these and see what works best for you, it may unveil your passion.
