Where to share your knowledge?
I owe a debt to all those who have written guides and tutorials about various programming topics. They have helped me many many times, and I want to pay it forward. I've learnt a few tricks on my own, and want to share them.
Question is, where?
There are many options it seems. Self-hosted blogs, Medium, GitHub Pages and of course, IndieHackers.
Getting paid isn't a concern. I would like the content to reach whoever might benefit from it though, so getting reach is important. And if I could have all these articles somehow reflect my skills and willingness to contribute to the community, that would be a nice bonus.
Any suggestions?
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That is a noble initiative!
Seeing there are some really good suggestions listed here from @ViktoriaInqoob and @dSebastien. If I were to add upon on those, I would ask you to never shy away from explaining why you approached a problem a certain way. More often than not, a helpful blog post or stackoverflow answer solves my problem but leaves me wondering why the programmer chose route ABC instead of route XYZ. Providing a bit of context might seem trivial to you, but more often than not - to the reader it helps understanding the problem at hand.
Why I mentioned Medium...
Medium is extremely simple. It makes it noticeably easier to start and maintain a blog. Many large companies use Medium for their blogs to not be tied to other platforms.
Medium has its own established audience.
Another advantage of Medium: is having an established audience and traffic. Medium has a vast group of readers who specifically come to the platform to read other users' content.
https://hashnode.com/ has been gaining popularity in the developer community. You could also consider writing for https://www.freecodecamp.org/ or https://dev.to/ or similar platforms (However, I am not sure how easy/hard to contribute to their platform). Also, I have seen https://draft.dev/ for paid posts/tutorials.
Medium/Substack also is fine, TLDR, just get started. You can always migrate to a different platform if you do not find good reach or cross-post across platforms.
Thank you. This was the kind of response I was hoping for.
Can you elaborate on crossposting? Is it OK to post the same thing on multiple platforms? Or should you just post links to your personal github page or blog?
Looks like a lot of folks are doing this already. Googling "cross-posting in dev.to" led me to this article that describes a developer's workflow for cross-posting.
The author also mentions a tool named https://codewrite.io/ which helps developers cross-post their blog using a single click.
There are different knowledge sharing platforms for different purposes. Wiki is the biggest. SO/GitHub for coder. etc etc...
Answers on StackOverflow, gists on GitHub, posting on some of the blogs I own (even though I keep thinking I should start a separate blog for programming stuff, I keep posting programming tutorials on a design blog).
Whatever you choose, I hope you backup your articles on GitHub in Markdown. So many platforms come and go. Text stands the test of time.
Medium was great until it got really pushy about signing up and they degraded their user experience. Dev.to and substack.com are pretty popular these days. Many platforms also have APIs for posting.
I decided I would build my own platform to handle newsletters and internationalization. Anyway, whatever you decide, thank you for contributing and making the programming community even better!
Recommended readings:
Though really, something like Jekyll or NextJS can be easy and nearly as nice.
Being someone who has learned from various sources. The first thing you should ask yourself is how extensively you want to help and what format you prefer and how much time you have at hand. Any blogs based and youtube are the point to get started. You can work here progressively, but If you are serious about a clear syllabus, you can head to self-hosting or udemy like sites to host for free. It's noble what you wish to do. There are so many sites designed to help learn programming it is hard to tell you something exact but if you have clear idea of the above you should be ready and starting to create something. Once you do get started, do share with us 👍
Blogging is an excellent platform for sharing thoughts and knowledge with the online community, and bloggers around the world also use it to share their professional skills. But the benefits of blogging don't stop there. More and more marketing, finance, and healthcare professionals are turning to blogs to share their expertise, network with like-minded people, and find new opportunities in their field.
The key is to choose the right platform. Medium, I think its a good placed
For me, it's in the Discord Server I started and manage (with a team). This is because we talk. We are all on cam in calls, we really relate with genuinity.
Hare are my two cents:
Depending on the type of content, you may also cross-post it on other sites.
No matter what, make sure to set the canonical URL to point to your own domain. That way you'll get all the SEO benefits, no matter if you cross-posted.
My answer was quite generic (I read in diagonal). Here's more:
Do all the above because it'll also serve you and will help you increase your reach over time. But also cross-post to HashNode and DEV.to. It's a bit of a hassle for code sample, Github gists and Youtube links, but it doesn't take that much time and can be automated.
You can consider Twitter. Developer community is very active on it. Tips, Threads about specific domain are very common. Personally. I learn a lot from Twitter.
What about answering stack overflow questions?
It's a great easy to give back. But I was asking about sharing new information and insights that people may not have asked about, in long form
In the WBE Space we have a slack channel called build-in-public and I quite often share what I have learned there. Besides that, I also write on my personal blog, twitter and here (IH)
Of these options, I like the self-hosted blog. Even better than that would be a Gitbook or similar.
Probably need to find a niche you love and start your own blog / Medium with contents extensively on that topic.
Ah, the content is not the question. The question is what the pros and cons are of different mediums (lower case m) or platforms.