How to Start an Engineering Blog
Launch a technical blog for your company in ten steps.
An engineering brand tells the story of the engineering experience at a company, the technical problems engineers are solving, and their leadership in distinct areas. With the right resources, an engineering blog is a great way to share that brand with the world.
I launched the Pinterest Engineering Blog in 2013 and edited the Facebook Developer Blog years before that. Here’s a playbook based on the lessons I’ve learned.
Why start an engineering blog?
- Give an inside look at your culture (audience: candidates, why: recruiting)
- Celebrate wins of the team (audience: internal, why: morale)
- Help others and build a network (audience: community, why: thought leadership)
How to get started and keep it going
1. Get buy-in from leadership. Align engineering leaders with the vision and ensure they’re willing to encourage participation. Determine with them platform and publishing cadence, including pros/cons of hosting the blog on your own site, or elsewhere like Medium.
2. Build a team. Identify a nimble team who can source stories, review, and post. This should be a mix of people who are technical as well as adept at writing and editing. They should also have close relationships with the internal engineering community.
Be honest about what resources you have. Do you have writing help, but need a designer? How can you supplement with existing product shots, stock images, or working with a design contractor, for example?
3. Have a long-term vision and a queue. Have a plan for posting at least once a month, and develop a queue of content over time. Develop a plan for distribution and securing link love to increase discovery with the right audiences.
Tips: Create a Slack channel and send prompts to keep ideas flowing. Do a quarterly story search to mine ideas. Ask leaders to encourage their teams to contribute to the blog. Try to reuse content from conferences and white papers. Follow product launches with behind-the-scenes stories of building the feature.
4. Establish goals. Who are you trying to reach? What are you trying to prove as an engineering organization?
What does success look like? Reads and comments? Follows and social engagement? Internal happiness? Filling roles?
5. Hold yourself accountable to your goals. How will you measure? Clicks to the Careers site? Closed candidates? Internal and candidate surveys? Anecdotal feedback when you hear people love reading your blog?
6. Set the bar high for quality technical content, but not word count. Posts can vary from a ~1,000-word in-depth look at a technical achievement to 300–500 words of ‘how to’. Keep content true to your engineering brand. Steer clear of sales, marketing, recruiting, and PR pitches. Content should be technical — and if not — should be helpful to a technical audience.
7. Make it easy. Make it simple for engineers to self-start, submit, and get approved. Have a page on the intranet that describes the process.
8. Create an editorial calendar (here’s a template you can use) to track stories and plan. Decide if you want to open this to the broader team for transparency, or if you want to keep it within the Eng Blog team.
9. Representation matters. Encourage participation across the engineering organization. Amplify voices from groups underrepresented in tech.
10. Award participation. It takes time to write a good blog post. The benefits can extend from within the team to potential candidates. Celebrate engineers as they post in channels like Slack. Leadership should also recognize writers at the performance level and in reviews.
Sample process
- The engineer sends the topic to the Eng Blog team
- Engineer sends the draft to a peer / manager for technical review
- Engineer sends the draft to the Eng Blog team (Pro-tip: Create an engblog@ alias or Slack channel for sharing. One shared alias also makes signing into Medium easier in the future.)
- Eng Blog team makes edits and sends them back to the author for final review (this is when Comms/Legal should review, as needed)
- Eng Blog team publishes the blog post
- Eng Blog team amplifies through social and internal channels
- Engineer shares on their channels.
Topic examples
Under the hood
- How your team built a feature
- Overcoming a technical challenge (the problem, resources used, and how it was solved)
- A look inside your tech stack
Industry usefulness
- The technical interview process at your company
- How to restructure technical teams for success
General tech how-to
- Lessons around languages and systems that may be helpful to others
Tips for writing
Headlines and introductions should be concise and readable for all types of audiences.
Break up paragraphs with subheadings and use bullet points throughout.
Use visuals, code snippets, data, and charts. Format large blocks of code using gist.github.com.
Link to relevant content and other blog posts to keep the post moving.
Happy writing!
Malorie Lucich is a communications consultant working with companies on executive and product PR, content, and technical brand. Previously, she led Product & Tech Communications at Pinterest and Platform PR at Facebook.
