What better job than writing about development on Habr? While someone is preparing his big habrapost in snatches in the evenings, here, right during working hours, you share interesting things with the community and get benefits from it.
What job could be worse than writing on Habr about development? While someone writes code all day, then you look at these people and lick your lips, and cut your pet project in fits and starts in the evenings.
We () every year we hold more and more different conferences for developers, so now we are looking for another employee (in addition to me and ) for texts in our hubblog. To make it clear who we need and what awaits this person, I described what it is like when your job is to write texts for developers in a corporate blog on Habré.
What is the coolness?
What do I love about this job? While the purpose of any corporate blog is to help the company, this doesn't mean "spelling rave ad copy about how amazing the company is." On Habré, this simply does not work. Something else works here: write posts that are interesting and useful for the community, in which the mention of your activity looks appropriate.
You can write at least ten times without arguments “our conferences are wonderful and incredible”, and it's just that no one will read it. Or you can publish a text transcript of the report from the last conference, people will reach out for information that is useful to them - and at the same time they will understand with a real example what can be seen at the event and whether they want to go to this next time.
If I were required to continuously write texts consisting of an advertising bullshit, I would very quickly want to hang myself. Fortunately, instead I write texts on the topics of our conferences, where at the end there is simply a small postscript “since this text about mobile development attracted you, pay attention, here is a conference about it.”
The other benefit of this job is that you get to hang out with a lot of the coolest people. When part of your job is to interview someone of scale John Skeet, you listen to his answers with bated breath, and at the end he says “thanks for the questions, it was interesting”, you catch yourself thinking “wait, I also pay"?
Well, a bonus for fans of puzomerok: when writing habraposts is your job, and you publish them often, you can reach the first place in the rating of habrausers. And then you start getting strange private messages!
What is the difficulty?
But all these goodies do not mean that everything is perfect. The main challenge is next.
On the one hand, it is clear that the more you know about development, the better for such work, and if you are very immersed in a particular topic, then just in connection with it you can write something cool.
But at the same time, we have a number of conferences in different areas (from Java to testing), so for each author there are several events that need to be covered at once, and new ones can be added at any time. And this means that it will not work to be limited to your favorite topic and you will have to climb into a completely different, much less familiar one. And at the same time, our conferences are quite hardcore, their visitors are not the first in the industry, so the content should be interesting for experienced developers.
Being a senior in several directions at once is generally unrealistic. And now add to this that you also work not as a developer: you can devote some part of your working time to code so as not to break away from the subject area, but this is not your main activity. And add to this the regularity of posting: if people who write on Habr at the call of the soul can research one topic for months before writing the text, then this will not work out.
How, in such conditions, is it possible to write anything that can interest experienced developers?
It may seem that everything is completely gloomy, but there are quite a few working options.
How to live?
First, although you can’t write about many topics without a long personal work experience, there are enough that don’t require it.
A new version of Java has appeared, and developers are interested in “what has changed there”? For a normal post about this, you need to be able to write in Java, but you don’t need “months of experience” specifically with the new version, it’s enough to carefully understand English-language sources (it’s also useful to personally try out the innovations, but this can be done quickly). Is there a JShell tool in this new version of Java? Since it is new, even experienced developers will need a tutorial here, and before writing it, it’s enough to play around with JShell for an hour or two (“months” in REPL are simply nothing to spend on). GitHub made private repositories free? Of course, I want to inform the habrausers about such news immediately, and then it will take some time to research (so that the post is not from one line), but also modest.
Secondly, if you burn with a certain topic and understand it deeply, then this is also wonderful. Yes, it will be impossible to write about it every day, more often you will have to deal with something else - but when, among other things, your favorite topic pops up, then knowledge will come in handy. Here, Oleg was tinkering with the Graal project even before it became fashionable, so he willingly asked Chris Talinger, who works with Graal, about things like inlining parameters - well, that’s great: as a result, both Oleg is interested, and others who run away on the topic.
And thirdly, you can not be limited to your own competence, connecting someone else's. For example, in the format of an interview, where it is required not to know all the answers in the world, but to be able to ask questions. The most interesting people from all over the world come to speak at our conference, from .NET legends Jeffrey Richter to head Kotlin Andrew Breslav, such a sin not to ask. It turns out a solid win / win: both the interviewer is interested and the readers of Habr (our record was with the same John Skeet, which collected more than 60 views), and the speakers themselves are usually happy to give interviews on the eve of the conference, and this is an obvious benefit for the conference.
Of course, in order to question such people, certain knowledge is also required - but the scale of the requirements is completely different.
Another way to share someone else's competence is the already mentioned text transcripts of reports. It also happens that one of our speakers publishes a blog post in English, and we, by agreement with him, translate it into Russian. In such cases, it is required to understand the text, but it is not required to be an expert capable of writing it.
What does it lead?
From my own experience, I want to say that with such work, you look at IT from a rather interesting angle.
In general, this can be offensive: some kind of movement is happening everywhere, people are sawing interesting things, and you look at all this “outside”, ask questions, and as a result, you understand something superficially about each of these things, but in the implementation details you already you don’t understand - to understand, it would be necessary to constantly work with it. In the same place, in the depths, there is probably also a lot of interesting things, to see all of this fluently only provokes!
But at the same time, losing in depth, you gain in breadth of coverage - and this is also valuable. If you work in a specific role in a specific project, then you see everything through this prism: something doesn’t fall into the field of vision at all, you see something from the side (“testers are those bad people who break my beautiful code”). And when you write about different things, you see very different things, and not “from the side”, but from a bird’s eye view: you can’t see the details, but the overall picture is formed in your head. I talked (both in interviews and just at our conferences) with a lot of completely different people: from compilers to testers, from Googlers to startups, from writing Kotlin to writing Kotlin itself.
A JS developer may be curious to read habraposts from the C ++ world (“what do they have there?”), But he will be inundated with materials in the main direction and will not get to these non-core materials. For me, almost all areas are specialized, any read text about development and testing can be useful to me in my work.
I feel that in a sense I am very lucky: unlike most people, I can follow with interest how the development lives and develops in general during working hours.
Who do we need?
From all this it follows that a person for such work requires a rather peculiar one.
He (or she) should have a good understanding of development, but at the same time, a willingness to engage in non-development.
Understanding development is required not only from the point of view of the code, but also from the point of view of the life of the community. You need to speak with developers in the same language and know what excites them.
You need a combination of initiative and diligence. On the one hand, there are standard tasks that need to be completed (for example, we have the traditional posts “top 10 reports of the last conference”). On the other hand, we want you to offer ideas for interesting texts yourself, and not just wait for instructions.
Of course, you need to be able to write: both from the point of view of literacy, and from the point of view "to make it interesting." We appreciate texts that look not just like a dry technical tutorial, but are truly captivating. Let's say if you have a personal life story that somehow intersects with the topic of the material, it can be a great introduction.
Flexibility is also required: right now, we are primarily concerned with .NET and testing texts, so people with relevant competencies are especially interested, but priorities can change. In addition to Habr, we sometimes publish on other sites, and we also need to be able to adapt to this (the essence remains the same, “texts for developers”, but the format may differ).
And although no one requires us to work during non-working hours, here IT geeks will feel in their place, who in their spare time sawing a pet project for the soul or reading about IT: this does not directly solve work tasks, but ultimately helps to solve them more efficiently.
If everything written above did not scare you away, but interested you, and you want to know more details or respond - both can be done on .
Source: habr.com