Writing Powerful Programming Articles: A Guide for Success
In the summer of 2019, I decided to start writing articles about programming and data science. My main motivation was to merge my two passions: writing and data science. Additionally, I saw it as a wonderful opportunity to learn and pivot my career towards this field, which was quite distant from my job back then. I was working in the automotive industry, and although many of the tools I used then have been useful later in my career as a data scientist, there were many tools I didn't use in my job but read about constantly in blogs and online courses. Creating a blog would allow me to learn much more. So I thought, why not give it a try?
Next, I'm going to give you some tips that can help you develop your career as a writer in the field of programming and data science, based on my experience over these past few years. Let's get started!
By Yourself: Don't Just Chase Followers
One of my top tips when writing is to create a personal blog. Don't just focus on gaining followers; instead, focus on creating content that represents what you love to do. Later on, I'll discuss the types of articles that, from my experience, have had more acceptance from the audience. However, I must remind you that this shouldn't dictate your writing content. You should write content that you enjoy and that interests you. For example, I really enjoy creating exploratory analyses with public data and interactive visualizations. I typically choose cities I know and topics I'd like to learn more about and evaluate. While these types of articles may not have the highest acceptance, they are part of my personal brand and I love creating them.
By writing articles that you enjoy, you'll create quality content, which in the long run, will also enable more people to appreciate your content once they read it. The topic of the article may not interest many people, and they may not choose to click on it, but those who do will recognize the good content. Eventually, this will allow you to create a high-quality blog and, most importantly, a personal brand.
Enhance Learning: Include Code in Your Article
The readers of programming articles are typically a target audience with technical knowledge who want to learn more. Therefore, guiding explanations and results with the code used to achieve them greatly aids in learning.
The alternative I choose for displaying code in my articles is GitHub Gist. In my opinion, it is the most elegant way to present code because it appears formatted as it would on GitHub or in an integrated development environment.
Please read this one-minute article on how to implement code in your article:
Incorporating Interactive Visualizations in Your Article
Any Data Science project relies heavily on visualizations. This is a key tool that any data scientist must master. Medium not only allows you to add static visualizations to your articles, such as images, but also enables you to embed interactive visualizations created with libraries like Plotly.
The following article explains you how to add an interactive visualization created with Plotly to your article. Take a look
