#30 - Philip Kiely - Nailing a Book Launch With Only 13 Twitter Followers

The Entrepreneurial Coder Podcast

Philip is a developer, writer, and entrepreneur who focuses on where code and words intersect. He has written for the likes of CSS tricks, Smashing Magazine, and Twilio. He’s a very recent college grad and is the author of Writing for Software Developers which is available now.

Philip's Links
Writing for Software Developers
Who Pays Technical Writers
Philip's Website
Philip on Twitter
Philip on YouTube

Transcript
[0:00] [background music]

Ryan Chenkie: [0:08] Hello, and welcome back to "The Entrepreneurial Coder Podcast." This is a show where I talk to you developers who are in business of one form or another and I try to get a sense of how they got to where they are and how they do the things they do.

[0:21] If you're a developer and you want to get into business, or maybe if you're already into business and you want to see where to go next, then hopefully this show is of value to you.

[0:29] This is Episode 30 with Philip Kiely.

[0:42] Quick announcement. I have just launched my latest teaching focus, which is going to be on "Security for React Applications." You can find it at reactsecurity.io. If you're a React developer and you want to find out how to do things like add authentication and authorization to your app, if you want to find out how to harden your frontend react code, then I got some courses that will show you how to do just that.

[1:03] There are some free course offerings, there are some pro courses. Hopefully, you can find something that is useful for you. Head over to reactsecurity.io to check it out.

[1:21] My guest today is Philip Kiely. Philip is a developer, writer, and entrepreneur who focuses on where code and words intersect. He has written for the likes of CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and Twilio.

[1:33] He's a very recent college grad and is the author of "Writing for Software Developers" which is available now.

[1:39] Philip, welcome to the show.

Philip Kiely: [1:40] Hi, Ryan, thanks for having me on today.

Ryan: [1:43] It's a pleasure to have you here. I was really intrigued to talk to you because you recently launched a book called Writing for Software Developers. This is something that's super interesting to me because I've done a lot of writing, and I'm a software developer. I'm very fascinated about how these two things coincide and why it's important to be a good writer as a software developer.

[2:08] Maybe that's where we could even start. I'd love to get your thoughts on why you think it's important to be good with words when you are also good with codes. Maybe give us just a breakdown of why is that you think that's important to be a good writer as a software developer.

Philip: [2:25] Sure. Imagine you went and sat down in front of your computer and said, "Hey, Siri, make a website." It's not really going to do anything because you haven't been specific enough.

[2:36] [Siri speaks]

Siri: [2:38] I found this on the web for "Make a website..."

Ryan: [2:40] There goes Siri. [laughs]

Philip: [2:41] Sorry about that.

Ryan: [2:41] [laughs] That's OK.

Philip: [2:42] You instruct your computer to make a website and it's not going to do anything because it doesn't know what you want. You have to use the actual language, you have to use HTML, CSS, use some frontend, some backend. Writing is kind of the same way. If you just tell someone, "Hey, make a website," they're not going to really know what to do.

[3:05] You need to practice communicating with the same level of specificity and technical detail in a way that's readable to humans as you do when you're programming.

[3:18] Studying writing in this context, the book doesn't really talk about grammar, syntax, that sort of stuff. It's more about how you can define your audience, like, if I'm writing against the Python interpreter, I'm going to need to write Python 3 code.

[3:34] Similarly, I'm writing for an English-speaking audience, I'm going to need to write in English. My audience has a couple years of background in these topics, so I'm allowed to make certain assumptions about what they're already going to know coming to the article.

[3:48] It's taking the same approach to technical communication that you take with your computer and just translating it to a new language that happens to be, instead of a programming language, whatever human language you're writing in.

Ryan: [4:02] That makes sense. Have you found, in your experience, that software developers in particular aren't generally great writers at the same time? I sense that perhaps you found a need here with this book you've written, "Writing for Software Developers."

[4:23] Have you found it the case that -- and I've heard this from various people that I've spoken with, that if you got a really great software developer, chances are...Maybe not chances are, but there is a chance that they won't be that great of a writer at the same time. They may not know how to communicate with words to quite the same skill level that they can communicate with code.

[4:45] Have you found that to be true at all?

Philip: [4:48] I think that that can be true for a lot of people, but for the industry as a whole, I think that as more and more people are getting into software development, we are getting a broader range of backgrounds in the field, and thus a lot of people are coming in with more pre-existing communication skills.

Ryan: [5:07] Right.

Philip: [5:08] I think that there are a lot of reasons why this perception that software developers are inherently bad at writing exists. I've definitely seen some of my friends coming into college as international students struggling with writing, just due to having to write in their second or third language, and many of them gravitate towards software development.

[5:29] There are plenty of people who get into software development because they don't like writing. I think that overall, there's no inherent reason that someone who is good at programming can't also be good at writing.

[5:42] When people talk about, "You can be the best in the world at one thing or it's a lot easier to become really good at two things, find that intersection and be really effective operating there," I think that when you take two, especially disconnected things or apparently disconnected things, like writing code and writing words, and find that intersection, that's a very powerful place to operate.

Ryan: [6:09] If someone's out there and they're thinking, "Maybe my writing skills are all right. Maybe I don't even know if they're OK or not."

[6:16] If you were trying to convince them that they should take a look at the skills that they got, writing-wise right now, and try to improve upon them, and you were to try to give them some reasons why that's beneficial to do, what would you say? What are the benefits of being a better writer as a software developer?

Philip: [6:35] Being a writer can help you develop your expertise in anything. The first thing I would do is I would ask them what their goals were because I'm sure that writing could help them reach their goals. In order to tell them a specific path or give them specific reasons, I'd have to know exactly what they wanted.

[6:56] For me, I knew that I wanted to be able to teach a bunch of people the same stuff that I had struggled to learn myself. For me, practicing my writing was for the purpose of gaining access to large publications that would be able to magnify and amplify my voice t...