⚡ In a hurry? Skip straight to the rules ⚡
Don't Make the Same Mistake I Did
I have plenty of regrets, and one of them is not starting to write my own content years ago. Better late than never, as they say, but still.
I want to make sure you don't make the same mistake. Every week I see more people joining this amazing community, and it reminds me how excited I was when I first signed up back in 2018. (If you're curious how I ended up here, I wrote about it in my previous article.)
Back then, I thought writing was only for seasoned veterans. I couldn't have been more wrong. I know plenty of engineers with years of experience who still can't write a single technical article. Not because they have nothing to say, but because they never tried.
Time to Take the Leap
Trust me, you don't need decades of experience. You're fine.
Your first article will probably feel tricky, awkward and hard. Speaking from experience, though, it gets so much easier after that. And your first one will always be special, no matter how good or bad it turns out. You might cringe at it in a year or two, but that's a special kind of cringe. It's proof of how far you've come a long way since then.
Not Sure What to Write About?
You don't need a groundbreaking idea. Some of the best first articles are simple:
- A bug that took you way too long to fix, and what finally solved it
- Something you learned this week that you wish you'd known earlier
- How you got into programming
- A small project you built, even if nobody uses it
- A concept that finally clicked for you, explained the way you wish someone had explained it to you
And so many other ideas that you can think of.
If it was interesting to you, it'll be interesting to someone else.
✍️ The Rules
Alright, I'm going to be your first reader.
👉 Write your first article on DEV. Any topic, any length. Short is perfectly fine.
👉 Drop the link in the comments.
👉 Optional: tell me what finally made you hit "Publish".
I'll read EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM and give you honest, thorough feedback. I promise! 🤝 I always deliver whatever I promise.
One small request: write it yourself. Use AI to check your grammar if you like, but the voice and the story should be yours. That's what makes a first article worth reading.
Already a Writer? You're Invited Too
If you've been writing for a while, drop a link to your very first article in the comments, or share one piece of advice you wish someone had given you before you published it. Nothing calms first-time nerves like seeing that everyone started somewhere.
The Hall of Fame Is Waiting
A few weeks ago, I asked you to share the article you're most proud of, and it turned into the DEV Hall of Fame: 65 authors, 65 masterpieces. If you start now, your work could earn a spot when I put together the next volume.
Let's get the journey started! 🚀
Let's stay connected!
Top comments (127)
@georgekobaidze Sir, you already know my first technical article but this one is latest:
A humbling reminder that passing tests can lie
I'm Not on the DEV Team. I Still Debugged Their Missing Badges From Public Code. (And My First Test Was Wrong.)
Have A Great Day!
Thanks for sharing, I'll read it! However this one's dedicated only to first articles and first-time writers. 🙏
No worries Sir. I'll be just glad for you to read it.
Have A Great Day!
This is actually great. I'm happy you're finding these issues. That's the first step towards making this platform better.👏
Thank you for this ✊.
I built using AI a tool that can help send message locally from a device to another.
I'm very proud because I'm trying to understand better how to create automation tools to help devs
today I did my second post related to Cthrone my project:
dev.to/fiwon123/cthrone-v0191-2jio
Though this clearly isn't your first post, is it?😄
Not the first one, but my post I considere more. I started posting on the 25th of last week just letting you know.
My first one was more a experience then something useful: dev.to/fiwon123/my-experience-usin...
Really interesting concept. I wonder how you'll solve the "not in the same network" problem. Well done!👏
Ty very much, rly appreciate that 🙂
Well, this takes me back more than ten years.
kenwalger.com/blog/css/numeric-inp...
And wow, I had some typos and grammatical errors in there. 🤦♂️No editors, no AI to check things, just the ramblings of someone wanting to start a tech(ish) blog.
First on Dev.to: dev.to/kenwalger/indexing-in-mongodb
More typos and grammatical errors.
I've learned a lot over the years, not just in technology, but in the content generation and publication process.
Great article, it really shows how much difference a well-placed index can make.
It took me back to when I first started working with databases. For the first few weeks, I had no idea indexes even existed. Then I was implementing a CRUD operation, and one of the developers told me, "Hey, you can use an index there."
I looked it up, and the article I found said indexes make queries faster. My first thought was: OK, then why don't we put them everywhere? So I googled exactly that and learned about the trade-off: slower writes. Every insert or update also has to update every index on the table.
That's when I got curious about what an index actually looks like under the hood. In PostgreSQL, the default is a B-tree. It keeps the data sorted like a sorted array, so lookups and range scans are fast, but it splits the data into pages arranged as a tree. That way an insert only touches one leaf page instead of shifting everything around. Seeing that design made the whole read-vs-write trade-off click for me.
I ended up reading about indexes for the rest of the day. Good old days 😄
A truly heartening gesture! One need not be an expert to share valuable knowledge. I sincerely admire your generosity in encouraging budding writers and offering them your time. Such kindness makes a community flourish. Much appreciated!
Thank you! I’m here doing what I can to help the community.🫡
"If it was interesting to you, it'll be interesting to someone else" is the line every hesitant first-time writer needs to hear. As someone who only started writing here this year, the thing that surprised me most is how kind and specific the feedback is. People don't just say "nice post", they add the tip you missed. Promising to personally read every first article is a really generous way to lower the barrier. Hope you get flooded with submissions!
Thanks! I really hope so. I want this to reach more and more people.
I started this blog a few months ago but in reality the thought crossed my mind more than a year ago. I found it so hard to start because I didn't know where and I thought that my articles would be kind of useless as a beginner, I even forced myself to write about something but didn't really work. At a certain point I learned about Windows permissions dev.to/encryptedscenes/windows-isn..., got so confused with terminologies, lists, etc. and I thought I could explain it in an easier way and this was my spark. This was, however, not my first post because, since I'm interested in so many things and I'm still exploring, I thought it would be kind of random to just talk about a different topic every day that aren't or don't seem related every time without explaining why. So I wrote a relatively short post to explain my journey dev.to/encryptedscenes/the-beginni.... After that, you're right, it's getting easier to write posts
I loved this article. People really underestimate how tricky Windows can be, just because it's known as the more user-friendly option compared to Linux.
Your points really resonate with me. I learned system administration back when I was a student, and Windows was sometimes even trickier than Linux. At the core level, I'd say Linux is more intuitive, and more things just make sense.
Not to mention PowerShell. I still haven't fully grasped it. It feels kind of weird to me.
Great article, thanks for sharing!
By the way, I also checked out the actual first article on your profile, and it's really good too. You write about cybersecurity and similar topics, which I find fascinating.
I'm planning to write a separate article featuring people who've shared their work with me here, with links to their first articles. Which one would you like me to include: this one or your actual first one?
Thank you for your feedback!
PowerShell should be "easier" because of the structure of commands (verb-noun) but for some reasons I always need to search for commands on the Internet or on Notion because I can't remember them. Not to mention PS modules. At the moment I haven't really practiced it yet, just learned it on the HTB Academy
I'd be fine with you choosing whichever you like or fits best your article's theme, but I'd choose the Windows one, it was the one that I first thought about and means more to me
Looking forward to reading your article!
Using Notion as a "cheat sheet" is really relatable.
Great insights, thanks for sharing those details! And keep writing, your style is really catchy and interesting.
Thank you!
dev.to/xulingfeng/i-cut-my-ai-test...
Kinda feels like digging up my old messy work, haha 😂
Great first post! Realizing you were paying to process pixels when the DOM already had everything you needed is such a simple but powerful insight. The real numbers and honest takeaways make it an easy and enjoyable read.
Thanks a lot for your kind words! It was quite an "aha‑moment" when I figured this out. Real‑world numbers really help ground the theory.
Love this initiative, Giorgi!
Here's my first technical article on DEV. I was curious about what MCP servers could actually do beyond what was mentioned in their README so I built a scanner and tested it against the top 50 MCP repositories.
What started as a small experiment eventually grew into a project which I'm still actively working on.
I scanned 50 MCP servers to see what they can actually do — here's what I found
Great write-up. The builtins-injection demo is something a lot of Python devs don't know, and the reachability angle is what makes this more than a linter. Two thoughts: stripping builtins is still escapable via subclasses() tricks, so the AST allow-list approach feels like the stronger "done right" example.
Thanks for sharing.
I love this. I wrote recently about whether the tech community is really as welcoming to beginners as we say it is, and this is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. It's one thing to encourage people to put themselves out there, but actually offering to read their work and give thoughtful feedback is something else entirely. That first bit of encouragement can mean so much to someone who's nervous about sharing their work. I really hope a bunch of new writers take you up on this.
The community is definitely welcoming. But I feel like we need to do a better job encouraging newcomers to start creating their own content.
I’m happy to contribute to it!✌️
The line that hit me: "Your first article will probably feel tricky, awkward and hard... but that's a special kind of cringe. It's proof of how far you've come."
I remember feeling exactly this way. When I started, I thought I needed to be a senior expert to write anything worth reading. I'd stare at a blank page and think, "Who am I to write a tutorial on this?"
The advice I wish I'd been given earlier is this: You don't need to be an expert. You just need to be one step ahead of the person reading it.
If you just figured out how a for loop works, write about that. The person who is still confused by it will learn way more from you than from a senior dev who forgot what it feels like to be a beginner. You don't have to be a guru; you just have to be a good guide for the stage you just passed.
I also love your rule about writing it yourself. AI can structure an article, but it can't feel the frustration of a bug that took three hours to fix. That human element is the whole reason people read blogs.
This is a great initiative, man. I'll be reading through the comments to support the new writers!
Thanks! I’m so looking forward to seeing what people come up with. Their ideas are especially interesting, cause they’re new to all this and their perspective is much different.
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