from Hacker News

How some good corporate engineering blogs are written (2020)

by montyanderson on 5/30/24, 2:56 PM with 60 comments

• by benreesman on 6/1/24, 6:19 AM

  I never ceased to be surprised at the clarity of thought that Dan can bring to even ostensibly qualitative topics.

  I had the rare pleasure of catching up with him briefly not all that long ago and we somehow stumbled onto trying to describe our individual specializations. I don’t remember if I actually articulated this or realized it shortly after, but my conclusion is the same.

  Dan is many things: a mathematician, an electrical engineer, a discrete logic specialist, a computer scientist. He’s a demonstrated expert in all of these things.

  But the unifying theme is Dan’s real speciality, which is rather general in utility: rigor.

  An excellent essay and an excellent analysis as usual. If you haven’t read his entire catalog, I recommend anyone passionate about drawing plausible conclusions or building things meant to last do so.

• by tetromino_ on 6/1/24, 1:47 PM

  I don't write blog posts not because there is some bureaucracy stopping me (although I am sure there is bureaucracy), but because it's a poor use of my time. I have never in my career had a point where I felt I could sacrifice 1-2 workdays on a polished technical blog post. Even if all of one's planned tasks are on track (they are never on track - by design of the process, one inevitably takes on more tasks than time exists), there is always a years-deep backlog of papercut bugfixes, tech debt cleanups, and minor-ish feature requests, not to mention colleagues wanting some advice, rubber-duck design conversation, or in depth code reviews - doing any of which would be both more useful and more personally satisfying than writing a post.

  I suspect people mainly write blogs only when required - either they are forced to promote themselves by their circumstances (they are between jobs or they are an independent consultant) or their boss asks them to (a tech blog makes for good PR for our project).

• by taway40524531 on 6/1/24, 4:43 PM

  At Google my team wrote a post for the Google Cloud blog about our product. This article is painfully true, in particular "Non-engineering approvals suggest changes authors find frustrating".

  My coworker wrote an initial draft and the rest of the team left some minor suggestions. Then we waited for weeks to get approvals from multiple people, mostly non-engineers, one of whom was at the company for whole of three weeks. Had to make several changes we didn't like but had no choice.

  After addressing all their (at best, non-consequential) feedback we had to wait another few weeks to hear back again. This time one person who initially required we change X to Y was apparently replaced with another review, who insisted we absolutely have to replace Y with X.

  In the end it got published, but was so heavily butchered it is a very bland and uninteresting post.

  As a silver lining, we ended up writing a technical paper about the product later and that was much better experience, reviews came from internal researchers and domain experts.

  (throwaway so I don't add too many bits of identifiable info to main pseudoanonymous account)

• by spondylosaurus on 6/1/24, 4:42 AM

  > Despite the seemingly obvious benefits of having a "good" corp eng blog, most corp eng blogs are full of stuff engineers don't want to read. Vague, high-level fluff about how amazing everything is, content marketing, handwave-y posts about the new hotness (today, that might be using deep learning for inappropriate applications; ten years ago, that might have been using "big data" for inappropriate applications), etc.

  It's sad how the majority of corporate software blogs do seem like they're written (1) so Marketing can justify their existence or (2) to cast an SEO line in the hopes of reeling in some C-level who's ready to whip out the corporate credit card on a new tool. The latter is a pretty valid use of resources if it brings in revenue, but it's still a bummer how many blog posts seem like they're going through the motions... speaking as someone who once got conscripted to write a bunch of half-baked "thought leadership" blog posts in an industry I barely understood. (Never again!)

• by 000ooo000 on 6/1/24, 1:27 AM

  Semi related: anyone know of a good link aggregator of mostly software development content? Preferably good quality stuff, not blogspam/medium.com crap. HN isn't really scratching my itch anymore.

• by tuttyboy on 6/1/24, 12:11 PM

  Having a technical editor is key (like companies in this article), and not editing too much. I’m non-technical and have edited drafts of engineering blog posts too much and lost favor with engineers who contribute.

  Once I restored that favor, I would have lost it again if I told contributors, hey, we’re going to share your draft with a bunch of your mates (like companies in this article). That’s groupthink and it brings any blogging momentum to a standstill.

• by donatj on 6/1/24, 4:00 AM

  I worked for a company where every blog post went through an SEO team and came out keyword laden and unreadable.

• by userbinator on 6/1/24, 3:22 AM

  Some are written, while the rest are just generated by LLMs?

  Omitting one word makes the title imply something else entirely!

• by gravescale on 6/1/24, 4:25 AM

  If you're into hardware, Analog Digital has Analog Dialogue which is pretty fun and somewhat like a blog in some ways. It goes way back to the 60s if you like blasts from the past.

  It's also fun how one word lost the "-ue" and the other didn't, but they both come the same Greek -logos.

  https://www.analog.com/en/resources/analog-dialogue/about-an...

• by noen on 6/1/24, 7:36 AM

  Slightly tangential but I want to throw out the blog of my previous team/organization at Microsoft- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/ise/

  I happened to be one of the engineers that designed and help launch this blog in July 2015.

  Despite many attempts by marketing overlords it has remained pretty pure for 9 years - all the authors are engineers writing production code with real customers, and almost every blog post contains a direct link to a GitHub repo with the full code context to reproduce the article - again with production* quality code.

  The same org also publishes the entirety of their engineering process here https://github.com/microsoft/code-with-engineering-playbook that has been continuously refined since 2018.

• by m_2000 on 6/1/24, 5:37 PM

  Best tech-blog I have found so far:

  https://acko.net/

  (3D graphics, webdev, tech-philosophy, (and not mine!)). If you know tech-blogs of comparable quality, I am eager to hear from you.

• by MasterScrat on 6/1/24, 4:44 PM

  It's a tangent, but reading this linked article from 2014: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...

  Am I reading correctly that egress in Europe costs $8 Mbps/month which is $0.0004/GB, while GCP charges you $0.12/GB?!

  And this was in 2014, and the article states the price they show is "higher than actual pricing"

• by vampiresdoexist on 6/1/24, 4:40 AM

  Is the Segment example supposed to be good?

  “Also socialize among eng team, get get feedback from 15-20 people.”

  That’s after 3 revisions, an eng manager and cofounder review, and a dedicated editor.

• by cibyr on 6/1/24, 1:51 AM

  (2020)

• by keiferski on 6/1/24, 4:36 AM

  Cloudflare is still under a thousand employees? That’s impressively small considering their impact.

• by thom on 6/1/24, 11:25 AM

  Blogs aren’t just content, and there’s no correlation between the resources available and the quality. They’re popular (both to read and to write!) because they’re a venue for authentic human voices. Like adding “reddit” to a google query they’re a way of cutting through all the bullshit. Corporate blogs that allow themselves to do the same are exceedingly rare. I suspect those that have decent tech content but convey an authentic sense of their engineering culture are probably more interesting than those with strictly deeper technical content.

• by the_gipsy on 6/1/24, 7:44 AM

  What a way to humblebrag.

• by andsoitis on 6/1/24, 1:23 AM

  Good process won’t guarantee good content. Bad process won’t prevent great content.

  What’s more important in my view is a compelling story to tell in a way that is not corporate speak, but instead something that enlightens or surprises the audience.

• by ozim on 6/1/24, 9:49 AM

  I think author overestimates value of blogging for a company. While also underestimating problem running a corporate blog.

  Not every employee wants to run the blog and if there is no one dedicated to it, most likely it will end up corpo-spam.

  If you are an unknown company, you should have a good blog. Especially having great engineering content will help hiring. It might make you stand out or find you at all.

  If you are established like cloudflare it doesn’t matter as much. I think they get loads of good CV’s anyway.