Ask HN: Does your company have a engineering blog? Any tips for starting one?

37 points by _samjarman 3 years ago | 12 comments

I’m thinking about starting an engineering blog at my company. We have an internal JS/AWS/backend “meetup” every two weeks and some of those talks could easily be stripped of sensitive IP and turned into blog content. However, I don’t often find myself reading engineering blogs of other companies. Do you? Why/why not? Any tips or thoughts welcome! Thanks :)

marginalia_nu 3 years ago |

I think in general most companies don't do enough interesting work to produce a consistently interesting engineering blog, along with a tendency to gloss over any sort of mistakes, which typically tend to be the spice that make a narrative actually interesting.

There are a few exceptions, but most entries in the genre are sort of trite and bland. They're too safe, I guess.

hifix 3 years ago |

I personally enjoy any sort of interactivity in tech articles. Things like sliders, inputs and buttons are great at keeping attention and can help make the subject easier to understand or illustrate things that can't easily be described in text.

Some examples:

https://liveblocks.io/blog/how-to-animate-multiplayer-cursor...

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/interactive-guide-to-flexbox

https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/

Although it's all very content dependent of course - FE development tends to lend itself a bit better to this sort of format.

refferal 3 years ago |

What is your main goal by starting an engineering blog? For most companies it is just another marketing tool.

SenHeng 3 years ago |

My hobby is collecting corporate/startup engineering blogs. It tends to be the first link I open whenever I chance upon a new website.

Here's are some of my favourites.

https://cushionapp.com/blog/categories/journal

https://blog.curtisherbert.com

https://webapp.io/blog/

https://whimsical.com/blog

https://informationisbeautiful.net/blog/

prepend 3 years ago |

What is the goal of your blog? If your goal is improving engineering skills and ability, then maybe make it internal only.

I always feel bad for company bloggers nowadays because it usually seems like an engineer has to talk marketing blargh and it seems like a nightmare to spend time with comms to make what’s interesting to me cleared and understandable by everyone.

To capture and share info, just start with an internal blog and write up all your meetings. I did this although it’s hard to measure success as people read it and use the material.

JohnFen 3 years ago |

I don't read the engineering blogs of other companies as a routine matter, but a search engine will occasionally point to a post in such a blog.

The reason I don't is because those blogs only rarely actually talk about anything of interest to me. Usually, they're mostly marketing with a veneer of tech in them, or they tend to focus on things only of value to those who work with or at those companies, or they just talk about common engineering topics.

Very low-value stuff (in terms of what is valuable to me). I can put my time to better use.

josh_fyi 3 years ago |

The key is to have no involvement from marketing and other executives, other than the engineering department. The approval process should be very very fast and easy. For example, just the CTO needs to approve and he does this almost always, and within a day.

Even the slightest friction makes the engineers not want to bother.

We've made a pretty successful engineering blog at blog.doit.com. I've published more there by far than in any comparable period of my career

JohnFen 3 years ago | |

I worked at a company that tried to start an engineering blog. That blog still exists, but is written entirely by the marketing department.

The problem was that the engineers are very, very busy doing their jobs. Writing blog entries was just more work on top of their existing workload, and that additional work was nothing but a loss. It didn't improve the product or development process in any way.

dev_family 3 years ago |

We have a blog on Medium. Not very stable platform - it's difficult to understand, how to grow a society there, how to become popular. But 1 thing we are sure about - it's regularity. You should write every month to be seen once. That's the only reason that we have more than 100 folowers https://medium.com/@dev.family

ezedv 3 years ago |

I find reading engineering blogs from other companies quite beneficial. They offer diverse perspectives, new approaches, and valuable insights that can inspire and enhance my own work.

Rather Labs has one, for example: https://www.ratherlabs.com/blog

I encourage you to start your blog and share your knowledge with the community! Best of luck!

rkrzr 3 years ago |

We have a tech blog that has been on the HN front page several times in the past. We focus on writing in-depth technical articles about how we use Haskell, how we solve scaling issues, and about our open-source work.

You may find some inspiration there: https://www.channable.com/tech

tikkun 3 years ago |

https://danluu.com/corp-eng-blogs/

There's also a service that does "corporate eng blogs as a service" - though I can't recall the name and can't find them on google. Pretty expensive though.

I think starting by posting the slides from the talks seems good.