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I'm going to be writing a blog post for my engineering team soon and I'm really impressed by the storytelling and presentation here. How did you plan out your b
by DarraghBurke 5y ago
I'm going to be writing a blog post for my engineering team soon and I'm really impressed by the storytelling and presentation here. How did you plan out your blog? Were there any resources or examples you found useful during the writing process? Thank you!
- jitl 5y agoI'm glad you enjoyed it! It took a long time to put together. I started out by writing down how the entire system works with enough explanation for a technically-minded non-engineer, and enough detail to satisfy a newly hired infra engineer. That rough draft was about 10,000 words. From there we started looking for a narrative. We extracted out the sections you see in the final post, and removed a lot of the superfluous technical detail so we didn't end up with technology buzzword soup; for example we cut discussion of Postgres, Memcached, etc etc, how we host the web servers; the kind of details that don't actually matter to the narrative. The illustrations were in the post from the beginning as Mermaid diagrams (https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid-live-editor/ https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid-live-editor/). As we got close to publication we polished them up in Figma. This is really the first engineering blog post we've put out, there was a fair amount of figuring-out-how-to-do-it going on. Now that we've had the experience, we're starting to write up our playbook internally.
- deadbyte 5y agoWould love to read the Director's Cut for more behind-the-scenes on storage, caching, infrastructure!
- euroderf 5y agoDid you... dogfood it ?
- mritchie712 5y agoI'd read a follow up with the Postgres part. I did a cmd+f for Postgres guessing that's what you used and was disappointed not to find it.