How to start an engineering blog (and keep it going)

It’s Q2 2025, and the number of unfilled engineering roles is higher than any time since 2022. One of the secret weapons to hiring the best engineering talent is a great engineering blog. That’s why companies like Airbnb, Figma, Uber, Atlassian, Netflix, and Grammarly all invest in sharing “how we built it” stories from their engineering team. 

An engineering blog is more than just a recruiting tool. It’s a way of building out loud and giving back to the developer community. You know, the same people you want to convert into buyers and advocates.

Client feedback from a recent blog post we worked on

I’ve worked with teams who need help scaling successful, long-running eng blogs, as well as teams that are just getting started. Sometimes the person running the blog sits on the marketing or recruiting team; other times they’re an engineering leader or even a founder. Regardless of who you are and what stage your blog is at, I’ve found the keys to success are pretty much the same. 

1. Circulate your goals

You might know why you care about having an engineering blog, but do your stakeholders? If they don’t understand the reasons behind the blog, it will be just another line item on the budget. 

Write down your goals and success metrics, and share widely. Your answers might include:

• Building up your technical brand. Success criteria: Publication in industry newsletters, watchers on open source projects, getting a blog post to the front page of Hacker News, shares on social. 

• Hiring. Success criteria: Traffic to roles page from engineering blog post, overall increase in high-quality applicants, qualitative evidence like when candidates mention the blog.

• Getting technical buyers interested in your products. Success criteria: Tracked customer pipeline driven by engineering blog posts.

Note: It’s OK to start small. You don’t have to build out a new page with a full content calendar—you can always begin with a few engineering articles on your main blog. Some ideas: a behind the scenes post to accompany a big product launch, or a post recapping a hackathon. 

2. Go broad and deep with your content

Think broad and deep with engineering blogs so you don’t run out of stories to tell or risk putting up posts that sound like marketing (shudder). 

Broad: Engineering blog posts are usually about things like “why we choose this framework over the other options” and or “a cool trick for doing X in Y language.” But don’t stop there: let other kinds of posts tell the full story of your organization (and fill out your content calendar).

• Company culture exposés. Example: How We Cut Process and Drove Growth at Synthesia 

• Employee spotlights. Example: My Journey to Airbnb - Michael Kinoti

• Research summaries. Example: What LLMs have in common with multi-armed bandits

• Guest posts by engineering-adjacent roles, like product management, data science, design, or UX writing.

• Recaps of seasonal projects or events, like internships.

Since you’ll end up with many different voices on your blog, put some style guidelines in place or work with a technical writer (more on that next) to ensure the writing isn’t too tonally fragmented. You’re looking for pieces that speak with different accents, not different languages.

Deep: Engineers crave transparency and detail—if you feel like you might be oversharing, you’re doing it right. Authors should write like how they’d like talk to a peer or prospective candidate who’s intelligent and experienced, but doesn’t necessarily know much about the specific topic. Let the content determine the length—engineering pieces can be short and sweet, but complex subjects may require lengthy explanation.

3. Involve a technical writer

A technical writer is an essential partner for running a great engineering blog. They’re language experts who also understand the technical concepts well enough to correct miscommunications, identify gaps in the logic/flow, and catch potentially embarrassing mistakes. 

Most importantly, they can help engineers go from idea to draft. This is the hardest part—the reason most great posts are never written. At Copytree, we’ve helped develop engineering blog posts by adapting tech talks, summarizing research papers, and (my favorite and the most common approach) interviewing authors. I often frame this as a brain dump so it’s not formal or stressful. It’s incredibly helpful for engineers who are very busy or not very comfortable with writing. 

An in-house technical writer, with inside knowledge about your projects and processes, is great if you have the option. Hiring a freelancer or agency has advantages too. They can represent the average reader for the piece: a technical person who’s not all that familiar with your company. They’ll be able to pitch new topics from industry to write about, and hedge against the curse of knowledge, where authors are so close to the problem that they struggle to adapt to their audience’s level of understanding.

4. Build a pitch pipeline

A healthy influx of pitches is key to getting an engineering blog off the ground and keeping it going. You’ll want to ensure a balance across your content themes and authors to make your blog effort sustainable.

Start by making sure the whole engineering organization knows about your blog. Have a conversation with every manager about how engineering blog posts help them fill headcount and grow and retain their best employees. The Pragmatic Engineer writes about why becoming a better writer is key to advancing, and the Staff Engineer book lists writing about strategy as a non-negotiable for being promoted to a staff role. 

To connect with potential authors, attend engineering brownbags/demos and join Slack channels, and start asking: “could this be a blog post?” You may underestimate how many developers love writing (some of them work here at Copytree!). Look out for people who keep personal blogs, give talks, write eloquently on social, or maintain great docs, and get them involved. Make it dead simple to submit a pitch—think DMs, not forms. 

Wherever you go, be sure to explain the “what” (your content pillars and themes), the “why” (the benefits for the company and engineers personally), and the “how.” Show people how easy, fun, and well-supported the process is; if it feels like a privilege instead of homework, they’ll be more likely to share great ideas and help develop them.

5. Shoot for fast, easy review cycles

With engineering blog posts, I can’t stress enough that short review cycles are essential. Engineers quickly move on to the next project. Waiting a day longer to get back to them could mean waiting until the next sprint for their reply. 

Provide a review checklist, and avoid too many cooks by only involving the people you need to check off these points. Here’s a start: 

• Are we talking about anything that’s top secret or not yet launched?

• Are external and internal names accurate?

• Did we miss any key details about this project?

• Are all the diagrams/images helpful and correct?

• Are the takeaways clear and interesting to an external audience? (This is a common mistake with engineering blog posts, one you should aim to catch at the pitch stage. If you can’t list the valuable takeaways for readers, it’s just self-indulgence!) 

Working with a technical writer can speed up the review process. The writer can vet the piece early, ensuring potential issues are caught long before the team reviews. The draft will be in a better state when reviewers see it (free from grammatical errors, etc.). And the writer can help respond to feedback if the engineering author is busy. 

6. Promote

Think about distribution before you start—and then execute your plan tirelessly for each piece. Engineers put in so much work, it’s only right that their stories have the best chance of connecting with readers. 

Post on your own social and newsletters, and look for places to cross-link from other parts of your website. Time pieces to go out with relevant conferences and industry events. Encourage authors and teammates to share the post with their networks. Also look for opportunities to cross-post on relevant community newsletters and (of course) Hacker News.

Maintain support for the effort by sharing the impact of the blog widely with your team. Celebrate teammates who contribute to the blog. Set up a time each quarter with your engineering partners to go over stats like impressions, social media engagement, and anecdotes. 

Don’t wait until you need an engineering blog to start one

An engineering blog shows you care about building great products and giving back to the engineering community. Like writing great docs or contributing to open source projects, it’s one of the best things you can do to win the trust and respect of technical people, whether potential hires or customers.

Dani Grant, CEO of Jam (devtools startup), from Calyx’s Developer GTM newsletter 

An engineering blog is a flywheel. Taking the time to tell these stories leads to more writing, more building in public, more recognition, and so on. 

So the best time to start an engineering blog is now. You’re already doing the work—all that’s left is to write about it. 

If you need help with that, you know where to find us.