Why Programmers Should Write Technical Tutorials

We consume programming tutorials often and as we go on with our carrer we tend to do that less and less. That would be the right time to start writing one instead and share your knowledge with others. Few programmers have a blog and even fewer have ever written an in-depth tutorial on it. I’ve written before at length about why you should have a personal blog, so I won’t tackle that topic here, but only focus on why you should start thinking about writing tutorials.

I have written a few small ones and with each and every one of them, even without having to go into too much depth since they were not very long, I have learned more than I could ever do otherwise on that specifing topic.

The reason is that before teaching others, the topic needs to be cristal clear to yourself first. Just skimming some documentation is not going to cut it.

Of course this doesn’t only apply to programmers¹, but to any kind of content creation in general. And you? What are you going to write about?

As a starter it is fine if your target demographic is beginners. They do not require as much research as writing a tutorial on an advanced topic. You need to be aware of your audience though. If it’s a tutorial maily aimed at beginners on a specific topic you can’t assume that they have an advanced knowledge of it and need to explain more things that you realize. A good way to see if it is straightforward enough is to have someone that you know (either a friend or a colleague) try to go through it and see how it goes.

Note: I noticed that most of the tutorials around are either generic introductions for absolute beginners or in depth analysis of a specific topic at an advanced level. There is a clear lack of content for intermediate developers.