Hashnode Bootcamp - These are some of my favorite things!

Introduction

Hi everyone, my name is Supriya, and I work as a Software Engineer at an edTech firm called CK-12 Foundation. While I majorly work as a frontend ReactJS developer, I am passionate about most of the interconnected technologies such as JavaScript, NextJS, CSS styling, Tailwind, working with REST and GraphQL APIs, querying through DB schema, and anything related to the overall application development.

Additionally, I share most of my tech learnings in the form of tweets and blog posts. In this way, I tend to learn about the fundamentals of a concept much better since I want to structure my article in the right way.

Hashnode Bootcamp 2023

In the last week of April, I came across this article that announced a 3-day virtual writing Bootcamp that aimed to enhance your technical writing abilities and make a lasting impression in the tech community. Without a second thought, I enrolled myself for it!

Dani Passos, the host of the event, gave us a hearty welcome and emphasized the value of technical writing for developers.

Here are all the things that I learned from these knowledge-packed sessions 💪

The Importance of Writing as a Developer By Ankur Tyagi

Ankur has a decade of experience in the tech world. He started out as a Java developer and transitioned to be one of the finest JavaScript developers.

My Learnings 📝

• Develop a habit of writing once a week. Try and see if this is something that you enjoy.

• Writing helps us in many ways. From improving communication to getting proficient in a new field of content creation.

• The more you get consistent with writing, you will create your own style.

• Read blogs written by various authors. Learn the aspects of the writing pattern that is helping them.

• You need not choose a unique topic. You can share your perspective on a topic that many others have written. For Example, write about the steps that you took to work around a given issue.

• Do not exhaust yourself with forceful writing. Instead, write when motivation strikes and produce quality work.

• It is crucial to understand who your audiences are and to tailor your content to suit their taste.

• Use social media to stay updated with the latest trends. These act as some of the best ideas for your next blog.

Leveraging Technical Writing to Land Opportunities and Boost Your Developer Career by Swapna Kumar Panda

Documentation is equally as important as product development. A true developer would focus on developing a robust application. Once this application is released to production if they neglect to create the documentation for this product, they are unable to provide the understanding to the next generation of developers.

Technical writing in the software domain can be of various types.

• Guides/Manual

• APK/SDK Documentation

• Training Materials

• White Paper

Documentation is the source of truth for the further generations to understand the research and development process behind creating a full-fledged application or product.

My Learnings 📝

• Write blogs about topics that you are already familiar with. In this way, you would be able to convey your thoughts as well as learn the topic in depth.

• While writing technical blogs, make sure to include appropriate code snippets and live demo embeds.

• Make sure to have a proper title and content overview. Create a workflow of headings, subheadings, and paragraphs.

• Add a section to summarize your article. This would be helpful for readers to get a brief understanding of what is discussed in the article.

• Share your writing on social media and keep an open mind for suggestions. This is also a form of learning.

• Technical writing is a highly sought-after skill in the tech industry, and it can open up new job opportunities for developers.

• As a proficient technical writer, you can benefit from great communication skills, better visibility, and monetization as well.

Leveraging Social Media for Monetization by Nader Dabit

This was one of the best sessions I have ever attended. The clean and concise presentation was the highlight for me. Nader shared some great advice on personal branding and creating optimized and personalized content.

Here is a peek at how he creates technical content for a particular topic.

Create resources for yourself in the form of blogs You only need to be good at 1 thing, scale it across all the platforms! Mix things to create something new.

My Learnings 📝

• Create personal branding for yourself by talking about your learning, blogs, and open-source.

• Have a clear bio/desc of who you are or who you want to be. Review all your data, and share links to more information about you. Keep a clear and consistent profile picture.

• Optimize your profile for time-constrained. (everyone is extremely busy). Share your learning, code snippet, GitHub repo, and short a recorded video in public.

• Be consistent, Be helpful (without expecting any return), Be authentic, and Be active and engaging.

• Use rich media and be thoughtful about how you format your writing - make it scannable with appropriate headings and sub-sections. Reuse content in multiple formats.

Building Your Personal Brand on Social Media by Ákos Kőműves

Writing is the most basic instrument we have available. It then takes on new forms that benefit us throughout time. Always make sure that you provide quality content according to the need of your audience.

Make sure to cater to Impressions, profile clicks, and decisions while building a personal brand for yourself. Here, he gave us an example of the simplicity of his Twitter bio, a link to his newsletters, and how to get started. This would help the audience get a clear-cut understanding of what content they can expect from him.

My Learnings 📝

• The quality of your audience is a function of your content quality.

• Make sure to attract your audience's attention by creating content in different ways. They could be Copywriting, Tech writing, Repurposing, Storytelling, etc.

• While building a personal brand, make sure you are authentic and being yourself. Do not neglect the person for whom you are creating this brand (i.e. YOU).

• Make use of analytics tools such as Typefully to help you schedule tweets and to track the impressions on your tweets. Use this as a reference to improve your content quality.

• Focus on sharing your content on one or two of your most active social media accounts. Learn and build in public, the consistency will surely pay off one day.

Freelance Writing Opportunities for Developers by James Q Quick

I believe he doesn't need any introduction! I have been learning from his video content for quite some time now. This session was thoroughly interactive as James answered all our questions!

Response - Always do things that you are excited about. This makes you feel more comfortable even if you are back from a vacation. From everything that you do on a daily basis, figure out what you enjoy and how you can do better. Build your routine, and check when you are most productive and accountable. Understanding yourself would help you easily to get back on track.

My Learnings 📝

• Make sure to work on things that excite you. Do not force yourself into creating content, this would harm your interest as well as your audience's interest.

• Keep a generic approach to topics that you want to write. For example, if you choose to write about web development, you have the liberty to write on JavaScript and its frameworks such as ReactJS, NextJS, Astro, etc.

• Having a good piece of content on your blogs would help you leverage opportunities. You can pick up a niche and write a series of blogs on this topic.

• Share the things you learn, participate in Twitter, discord, and meetup to make you more successful. Make sure to engage in communities by showing up and interacting with like-minded folks.

• Cross-post the blogs into multiple platforms to have more visibility.

• Keep track of all your ideas in one place. This will come in handy when you run out of topics to write for.

• Use AI tools as your aid to improve content creation. You could leverage these tools to get inspiring titles, concise bullet points, or even create examples.

• For instance - videotapit.com will take a video and write a blog post for it. You can rephrase this and personalize it according to your style.

• The best way to learn is to teach. As you are learning, you become the most relevant person to explain that concept. So make sure you document it.

Summarizing my learnings (TL;DR)

Despite the fact that each speaker covered a different aspect of technical writing, there were several points that they all shared.

• Technical writing is a powerful tool for developers that provides them leverage to create personal branding.

• Develop a habit of writing regularly and consistently. Make sure it excites you, and write about topics that you enjoy learning.

• Create content on one topic and amplify it across various social media platforms. This increases your visibility.

• Stay active on communities and social media. Engage with like-minded folks and expand your audience.

• The most effective strategy to produce original content is to share your learnings. You can use it as a portfolio.

Conclusions

I had a great experience participating in this three-day educational event. It has given me an overabundance of information related to technical writing. This blog covers only a glimpse of my learnings. Thanks to Hashnode for organizing and making it a huge success. 🚀

A heartfelt gratitude to all the speakers who provided their valuable time and knowledge to help us budding writers enhance our technical writing skills. A huge shoutout to Dani Passos for being a wonderful host. Thank you so much for making this session so interactive and engaging!

I hope you were able to take away something new and useful from this article! If you did, please drop a like on this post. ❤️

You can connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and GitHub ✨

Peace ✌