Alexander Beletsky's development blog

My profession is engineering

Github as blogging platform

No, I’m not going to talk about creation some github-backed blogging system. I would like to talk on some blogging style I tried to apply recently.

The problem is, technical blogging is difficult. I usually have a lot of ideas or know-how’s while I create some code. It’s just hard to blog about. As you didn’t do the blog post during coding, you might forget some details or simply loose the encouragement to blog about it.

As I mentioned in my previous post I recently created some code that contains Backbone.js + Express.js boilerplate code that could be great start for building single page applications. I felt I need to document it somehow, so even myself will remember what’s going on there. So, I put some README file there. Usually, I don’t write much documentation, but during writing it I realized that it’s a kind of blog post or tutorial I’m writing immediately after I created something.

I liked the way how it went. First of all, Markdown is great for technical blogging. I still use HTML and feel a but ashamed by that fact. It’s so easy to format and place code examples inside with Markdown (and it looks minimalistic and great on github). Second, the content of resulted readme file, pleased me much.. I felt it’s the same as blogging, but a bit.. more interesting, or so? So, I twitted about and great surprise for me, repository got 200 stars and 20 forks, got mention on JavaScript Weekly and raised some questions.

The same as blogging, but instead post you have repo with README + some valuable code. Instead comments, you got issues and pull requests.

That was really motivating experience. I think I would like to repeat it from time to time.