Herbert Lui

Blog on creativity, marketing, and the human condition.

6 types of posts for corporate engineering blogs

The majority of experienced developers who responded to this thread applied for a job or joined a company after learning more about it at a corporate engineering blog. u/improbablywronghere wrote, “Finding a blog post from a company is like you an interviewer at some company finding a public GitHub repo from a candidate.” Writing a blog is Hard Work, Plus, and Do Things, Tell People, at scale. If you face challenges with recruiting, your team needs more people to know about the work they’re doing.

Every team needs a blog. If your team hasn’t started a blog, and isn’t sure what kind of ideas to move forward with, this post contains 6 types of posts as a starter pack. It’ll mostly cover engineering blogs (as the title suggests!), though the structures can be applied to all sorts of industry blogs written by teams. Consider these types as starting points, not ending points.

These writing structures can also be useful for teams who have recently started or rebooted their engineering blog and are stuck on what to write about next:

1. What the interview and hiring process looks like

Naturally, passive or active job candidates you reach out to will wonder “What does the interview process look like?” You can anticipate this and write a blog post about what they can expect, and how they can succeed. How many rounds will there be? What kinds of questions will the interviewer ask? 

Examples: 

Fly.io also puts this in their documentation.

This post could also include information on how the team thinks about a specific position and the ideal candidate in this role. 

Examples:

You could also write about your team’s opinions on interviewing and hiring in general; for example, Honeycomb has an interesting piece here.

2. How we built ___

These posts show what engineering culture and process looks like. The idea is to build in public: to share the process of a feature recently shipped. Choose something your team is excited about, and write about it while the memory is fresh! Even just a few weeks will be too late; people’s contexts will have shifted and memory will be fuzzy. Anyone reading this will learn more about the details—e.g., how you deploy front end web apps, who makes decisions, how many teams were involved, etc.

Examples:

Also, explaining why your team built something can show a similar thought process, which is what job candidates will want to learn more about:

Examples:

3. Share your technology stack 

Show readers what kind of technology stack you’re working with.

Examples:

4. Why your team made a technical decision

Share your opinions and decision-making process on specific technology. More often than not, you’ve actually already written the words in memos or Slack or Threads, you just need to compile it together and put it into a blog post.

Examples:

5. Culture and lifestyle 

Show what a day in the life of working at the company is like, and what the responsibilities and scope of a specific role is.

Examples:

Alternatively, also highlight a team member who works at the company (interview or first-person); great engineers want to work with other great engineers.

Examples:

6. Evangelism

Share your industry advice and perspectives, and showcase the best practices you’ve developed.

Examples:

You could even write a whole book on this topic! See Postman’s recent work with The API-First Transformation, authored by evangelist Kin Lane. (The team also wrote a “How we built ___” on the writing process!)

See also:

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