What would you say to a new developer?
What do you wish someone had told you when you were just starting out?
What is the one piece of advice you wish you could share with new developers today?
I’m actively seeking guest posts from developers everywhere (see this example guest post). I’ve had guest posts from people who have been developing for 2 months and 20+ years. Everyone has something to teach.
General guidelines for guest posts:
- 200 to 1500 words long (but longer is fine)
- Focused on providing value to new software developers
- Written like a letter
- Can be a re-post of content you’ve written elsewhere; please let me know if that is the case
- Please, no commercial content (this isn’t a pitch site)
- In addition to the content, I’ll need a bio blurb and a link
- A word doc, URL, email or shared google doc all work for delivering it
As far as specific topics, suggest you focus on things that you still feel will be valuable in two or five years. So “this is how to set up your JavaScript environment” is not a great topic, but “this is why you should learn JavaScript” is a good one. The topic can be a specific technology, people skill or software practice. I find that that the audience responds better to a focused letter rather than multiple pieces of advice in one letter, so would encourage you to focus on one topic.
If you still can’t think of a topic, think about it this way: if you could send a message to yourself at the start of your career, what wisdom or advice would you share?
The audience is developers who are newer in their career. Based on mailing list signups, it is primarily developers with less than five years of experience. In the first half of 2020, the site averaged approximately 8300 visitors per month. Every post is delivered to over 250 email subscribers as well.
One thing that you can’t do in any guest post on Letters to a New Developer is link build. I get a few of these posts every month or so, where someone wants to publish a letter, but wants to drop in a few links with specific phrases to burnish their SEO. That’s not something that is interesting to me. I love to link to people’s websites in the bios section of a post, but other than that, links need to relevant and non-spammy. So if you’re looking to link build, this isn’t the site for you.
If the audience and the topic area seems interesting, shoot me a message with your name, email and a short description of what you’d like to say to new developers everywhere. I’m happy to have you bounce a couple ideas off me if you’d like. I’ll be in touch!
Letters To A New Developer 