On August 21, 2021, Bob is honored to receive an invitation from the Nuggets to be a live guest at creators Camp 3. In the live broadcast, Zhang Xinxu, Winter and Zheng Ye shared a lot of technical writing. It was the first time to participate in a large-scale external technology sharing activity. At the beginning, Po Ge was still a little nervous. However, under the support and encouragement of digging friends, A Bao Elder brother finally completed the sharing smoothly. Here again, I would like to thank all the friends who participated in the meeting, especially the “old friends” who helped share this activity in the early stage of the activity. Thank you.
Next, Po Ge will summarize the content of “7 Years of Technical Writing, Share 6 Snacks experience” PPT in the form of manuscript. He will introduce the five aspects of breaking through himself, how to choose a writing topic, how to start writing, writing skills and writing suggestions and writing AIDS.
First, break through yourself
When he first started writing, He didn’t build his own blogging platform. Instead, he used Github. Since then, it has “mixed” several mainstream technical communities, but the main technical writing platform is Nuggets. I think man’s worst enemy is himself, and the first step in writing is to break through himself.
At the beginning of writing, I believe that some friends like me will have the following confusion:
- Write an article too simple, feel to others have no inspiration;
- Write too “bad” article, afraid of being teased by others;
- Writing is not good, do not know how to start;
- Want to write, but do not know what to write;
- You’ve worked so hard to write, and no one reads it.
I don’t know if you have the above confusion when you start writing. These problems have troubled me for a period of time. Later, in the process of continuous writing, I found my original intention of writing — “to do technical precipitation”, so my writing has gradually persisted.
Some of the guys on the front end of my company had talked to me about the confusion of writing. They didn’t know what to write and didn’t dare to try. Then I use the form of technology sharing to push them to write. I will regularly select some technical sharing topics, such as design pattern topic, Webpack topic and Vue2 source code topic, and then ask each of them to prepare the corresponding sharing content and corresponding technical articles, and then ask them to share in the group, and the students attending the sharing meeting will score the shared content. In the end, we will select the top 3 winners in each sharing meeting, give certain rewards and publicize them on the company’s internal platform. In this way, let them take the first step and gradually develop the habit of writing.
In the last year or two, I have learned something about technical writing. He was the 10th most popular writer of the Year of the Nuggets in 2020, the first signed author of the Nuggets, Lv6, and his articles have been read by millions. In 2020, I used my spare time to write “Re-learn TS”, “Front-end Advanced” and “Source Code Exploration” and other e-books, downloaded more than 5W times. In nuggets and other technical communities, we published columns like “Learn from Po” and “Angular Road to Immortality”. The “Angular Road to Immortality” was written in 2017, when there were few Angular articles in China. I’ve written hundreds of articles documenting my learning of Angular.
How to choose a writing topic
Here I will share with you some directions for selecting topics:
1. Record the trampling experience or actual combat/optimization experience of a project;
2, record your analysis and thinking of some interview questions;
3. Share some brush questions or problem-solving experience of the algorithm;
4. Share what you learned from reading an open source project;
5, take notes of reading classic books, such as the front “little Red Book”, “Green Book” or “Rhino Book” study notes;
6. Summarize and learn relevant content of some technology or basic computer knowledge;
7. Share the design and implementation of the technical architecture or core functions of a project;
8, share personal growth experience, interview experience, etc.
For other writing directions, you can consult the tech community’s article rankings or analyze the tech gurus you follow. You can also find some topics to write about. For example, you can see the popular, the latest, and the hottest articles in the nuggets home page – recommendation column:
By analyzing these popular articles, you can find some hot topics to write about. In addition, my QQ mailbox has subscribed some good Weekly. Examples include JavaScript Weekly, Node Weekly, TypeScript Weekly, React Status, etc. These Weekly posts post great articles or open source projects every week. The information provided by these Weekly papers is also the source of some material for my topic selection.
How to start writing
After determining the topic of the writing, I suggest that you do not rush to write, you can first list the outline of the article, which can make the subsequent writing process more smooth. In fact, this is similar to normal writing code, think clearly before starting to write code, more efficient. I’m going to share an outline of what I wrote while writing Web API articles, using the Web API series as an example that you don’t know.
In my series on Web apis you don’t know about, I put together a general outline. Such as:
- What is XXX/what is XXX
- Know XXX API
- XXX API application scenarios
- XXX API and related knowledge point difference
I had the honor of being one of the first writers to sign with the Nuggets this year, and when I wrote my first contract article, I was struggling with what to write. The back suddenly remembered before to see the gold digger on the waves in the boat and autumn wind big guy wrote cross-domain article. These two articles summarize various solutions and implementation principles for cross-domain problems in our work.
Inspired by this, I thought of the file uploading scene in my daily work. So I first combed through the file upload, multi-file upload, drag-and-drop upload and clipboard upload scenarios based on my previous experience. After that, I used the keyword of file upload to search for relevant articles on digitating Gold, Google, Baidu and other platforms, and then improved the outline continuously. After preliminary sorting out the outline, I will conduct secondary processing on the content of the outline, such as screening and sorting.
After confirming the outline, in order to ensure the consistency of the article. I also combed the structure of each scene. For example, the single-file upload, multi-file upload and directory upload scenarios are divided into front-end code and server code. After confirming the skeleton of the article, the back of the writing will be a lot clearer.
The community of diggers is very helpful, not only to suggest the content of the article or feedback questions, but also to help you choose the topic, even the title for you.
Since the requirements of digging friends, even the title also helped me to think of, so I wrote a file download, understand the 9 scenarios is enough. In the process of writing, the outline is also combed first, and then the outline for secondary processing. After the context of the article is clear, I will start to improve the content of each chapter in the article.
4. Writing skills and suggestions
4.1 Writing Skills
4.2 Writing Suggestions
1, write more thematic articles, later can be easily organized into e-books or small books. If you write well, you can also contact a publishing house to publish a book. For example, the front-end advanced ebook, I include the play series, the You Don’t know series and the article read series. The relearning TS 1.0 ebook includes articles on design patterns.
2, write articles, draw more pictures. Source code analysis articles, in particular, can help readers better understand the core process. For example, IN previous articles on how to implement parallel downloading of large files in JavaScript and how to eliminate repeated requests in Axios, I have drawn flowcharts for the corresponding technical solutions.
3. Minimize unnecessary actions by adding quick links to quotes.
4, if it is their own executable code, it is best to run, to ensure the correctness and availability of the code. Take a step further and create a special project to manage it. For example, when writing a file upload, it is enough to understand the 8 scenarios, and a file download, it is enough to understand the 9 scenarios, I put the sample code used in the article into the Github repository.
5. Writing AIDS
As the saying goes, to do a good job, you must sharpen your tools. Finally, I’ll share some of the best writing AIDS I’ve used over the years.
5.1 Markdown tools
5.2 Drawing Tools
5.3 Source code processing tools
5.4 Other Tools and Resources
Of course, there are many useful online resources, and I’m going to share some other tools and resources here.
1, free legal hd picture material library: pixabay.com/zh/
Free and photo and video library: www.pexels.com/zh-cn/
3. Draft design: www.gaoding.com
4. Online picture design: www.canva.cn/
5, Ali Mom vector icon library: www.iconfont.cn/
6. Color matching website: Coolors.co /
7. Online flow chart mind map: www.processon.com/
8. Flying books: www.feishu.cn/
9. Chart bed tools: github.com/gee1k/uPic
10, Online tool set: tool.lu/
conclusion
This article Po ge shared 7 years of technical writing, their summary of 6 dim sum experience, I hope to help you. If you have other questions about writing, please talk with Bob. In addition, if you have other good tools or resources, please share them in the comments.