Typst is a new markup-based typsetting system that is designed to be as powerful as LaTeX while being much easier to learn and use.

This is an awesome HN thread on all the ways blogging have improved the lives of developers around the world. It’s brimming with statements like:

I’ve been blogging since 1998 and can trace every major step forward in my career to my blog.

The best time to start your developer blog was 1998. The second best time is right now.

I was a programmer for 12 years. I then switched to support and people management for 12 years. I now want to go back to programming for the rest of my career. I started working at Zed Industries on January the 17th, helping build the Zed editor and be a Rust programmer wannabe. End of June is going to be the judgment day. Will I remain part of Zed?

That’s right. I have a six month contract with the company my ex-GitHub colleague founded. They are trusting me to become productive in Rust within 6 months. With no prior experience in Rust, this feels like a Herculean feat. The interesting part is that I abandoned a high-paying job to do this. And by the end of the six month contract, Zed Industries and I may decide to part ways and still be friends.

And I am blogging about my experience so far. It’s a mix of personal learnings and small technical bits and pieces sprinkled here and there. But it’s mostly about my personal experience.

Yury Molodtsov:

Running your own blog in 2023 is still needlessly complicated, especially if you have any kind of taste. Why have one in the first place?

Social apps and networks are obviously the easiest options, but they’re geared toward vastly different things, and I just don’t trust their longevity. Having your own platform enables flexibility and portability, so your content can be kept online practically forever.

This!

There are many options out there, ranging from WordPress and Ghost to static blogs to managed online platforms and Micro.blog. How do you choose between them?

What follows is a survey of some of the popular tools and what Yury thinks about them. My advice is this: don’t worry too much about tooling. That’s the easy part. Writing’s the hard part. We often bike shed the easy parts to avoid the hard part. Yuri seems to agree:

Having the right tool certainly helps, but at the end of the day, what matters is what you write there. Focus more on the content and just ensure the process of writing and posting is simple enough.

Medium CEO, Tony Stubblebine:

Today, Medium is launching a Mastodon instance at me.dm to help our authors, publications and readers find a home in the fediverse. Mastodon is an emerging force for good in social media and we are excited to join this community.

This strikes me as smart for Medium and a big vote of confidence for Mastodon and the entire concept of federated social networking. With Tumblr support (allegedly) coming as well, what’s next? Reddit?!

Daniel and Chris do a deep dive into OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is the first LLM to enjoy direct mass adoption by folks outside the AI world. They discuss how it works, its effect on the world, ramifications of its adoption, and what we may expect in the future as these types of models continue to evolve.

The Open Podcast Prefix Project is a free and open source podcast prefix analytics service committed to open data and listener privacy. This hits close to home for us in a couple ways, so we invited the project’s creator, John Spurlock, Backstage to learn more about it.

Aaron Francis:

The goal is not to become famous, the goal is to increase the chances of luck finding us. For me, one of the most helpful ways to think about this has always been the concept of the “Luck Surface Area,” described in an old post by Jason Roberts. He wrote (and note, the emphasis is mine):

The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you’re passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.

Going further, he codifies it into a formula where:

Luck = [Doing Things] * [Telling People]

This reminds me a bit of John Gruber’s Obsession Times Voice. Not exactly the same, but there’s a healthy overlap that I find provocative.

Bhupesh Varshney’s been using Vale (a syntax-aware prose linter) in his writing workflow and it has significantly impacted the words he chooses. Here’s how he describes the tool:

Just like when writing software we use static analysis tools to find common problems, vale aims to help writers configure what words/prose to choose while writing technical documentation.

Neovim is Bhupesh’s fav editor. In this post he walks through getting Vale all set up and running with it.

The linked post is about a new book by Jeremy Wagner, but I just wanted to highlight the excellent aside on book writing by Chris Coyier near the end:

Write a blog post first, or maybe a whole bunch of blog posts. That’ll prove you clearly have words to say about this. Plus it will get the energy of your idea into the world. You might get feedback and constructive insights on the idea as it is shared. Then, hopefully, you can turn that blog post into a talk. That’ll really get you thinking deeply about your idea while getting even more comfortable with the idea of sharing it clearly. And, if all goes well, turn all of that into a book!

Looks like Jeremy did just that.

This episode was recorded live from GopherCon Europe 2021!

Natalie & Mat host three amazing devs who gave talks that showcase using Go in unusual ways: Dr. Joakim Kennedy is tracking Go in malware, Mathilde Raynal is building quantum-resistant cryptography algorithms, and Preslav Rachev is creating digital art.

We hear from our speakers how they got into Go, how they made the choice to use Go for their unusual use case, and how it compares to other languages for their specific needs.

We also chat about conference talks, submissions and public speaking - how to start, good practices, and tips they collected along the way.

Paul Bakaus from Google Web Creators joins Amal, Nick, & Jerod to talk about this new initiative to promote, educate, and equip people to create on the web.

Along the way we discuss Web Stories, AMP, RSS, Google Reader, and more, of course. Join us: for a more dope web!

Gabe Kangas:

The new release of Owncast –the self-hosted, open source live streaming server– opened up its first set of 3rd party APIs. So not only can you run your own live streams and own your content, but you can build bots, integrate it in to 3rd party services and be super creative in encouraging chat engagement in new ways.

Looks pretty slick.

Stephanie Morillo on:

1. Contributing to your team’s internal documentation
2. Getting paid to write and work with an editor
3. Improving your code review process
4. Using templates for writing tech specs and reports
5. Prioritizing learning how to write better emails and chat messages

In this episode, we dive into the role of communication as a developer, how clarity is driving impact and how to self publish as an independent writer. Join us, as we chat with Stephanie Morillo author of The Developers Guide to Content Creation about how to write better as developer and how writing can take you from good developer to great.

Stephanie Morillo:

Developers encounter technical writing everywhere: product & API docs, manpages, tutorials & more. We know it matters but what is technical writing exactly? And how does it differ from other writing?

In this brief post, I define what technical writing is, provide examples of technical writing in software and beyond, and explore other skills technical writers must develop to create successful and effective documentation.

Writing is hard. Technical writing can be even harder. This piece by Sandy Maguire has lots of help in it:

Here’s the biggest thing to keep in mind: your reader doesn’t really care what you have to say. You get maybe four sentences to convince them that your essay is worth their time. If you haven’t made your case by then, you’ve probably lost them to the next tab they binge-opened.

For those out there that lead or contribute to a corporate engineering blog, Dan Luu interviewed folks at Cloudflare, Heap, and Segment, as well as folks at three different companies with “lame corporate engineering blogs” to get a sense of what makes them interesting or lame.

I’ve been comparing notes with people who run corporate engineering blogs and one thing that I think is curious is that it’s pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp eng blog for a company with a nine to ten figure valuation and it’s not uncommon for my blog to get an order of magnitude more traffic.

…

In order to have a boring blog, the corporation has to actively stop engineers from putting interesting content out there. Unfortunately, it appears that the natural state of large corporations tends towards risk aversion and blocking people from writing, just in case it causes a legal or PR or other problem.

This week we’re talking about building technical courses! From video courses to written courses, we’ll give you our tips for building an effective and memorable course.

I’m giving away the four ways of generating ideas that I outline in the book. You can return to these sources over and over again when you need a new idea for your next developer blog post.

Stephanie Morillo (content strategist and previously editor-in-chief of DigitalOcean and GitHub’s company blogs) wrote a book titled The Developer’s Guide to Content Creation — it’s a book for developers who want to consistently and confidently generate new ideas and publish high-quality technical content.

We talked with Stephanie about why developers should be writing and sharing their ideas, crafting a mission statement for your blog and thoughts on personal brand, her 4 step recipe for generating content ideas, as well as promotional and syndication strategies to consider for your developer blog.

I’m not sure which is more interesting: the fact that Next.js is getting in to the static-site generation game or the fact that Notion is becoming popular enough amongst devs that people would use it as a back-end for their blog.

The Notion aspect, while interesting, comes with a big disclaimer:

since it is using a private API and experimental features, use at your own risk as these things could change at any moment.

Brent Simmons:

I’ve been asked a few times about using algorithms in NetNewsWire to bring articles you wouldn’t otherwise have seen — from outside your feeds list — to your attention.

I’ve also been asked a similar question about using algorithms to bring articles — from inside your feeds list — to the top based on the likelihood that they’ll interest you.

I’m not going to do either.

Good for him.

This is what Twitter and Facebook are about — but it’s not right for NetNewsWire. The app puts you in control.

This is what I love about the spirit of RSS readers. More like this, please!

Zach Leatherman drummed up an amazingly hilarious way to use sentiment analysis on his website. I can’t even count how many ways I 💚 this.

You’re running out of good reasons to stay on Medium.