Or: Why developer content that listens is way better than content that just talks
I’ve been doing developer marketing for almost a decade now, and one of the first things I learned, which still proves itself true every day, is that developers are smart and impatient. They’re quick to spot marketing fluff and even quicker to bounce if your content wastes their time. Respect that intelligence and impatience, reward their time with usefulness, and you’ll earn their attention.
While this dynamic isn’t unique to developers (it’s true for almost any knowledge worker), dev content is what I know best, so let’s focus there.
After years of wrangling developer-focused content at companies like Okta, ngrok, and Builder.io, here’s what I’ve figured out: the best developer content isn’t a lecture, it’s a conversation. Not because it sounds casual or tosses in a winking aside. Because it starts with a real problem, gives the reader enough context to trust the answer, acknowledges the relevant tradeoffs, and leaves them with something useful to do next.
The Broadcast Trap
So much dev content I read feels like yelling random JavaScript functions into the void and hoping for applause. Spoiler: the void doesn’t clap.
Here’s why broadcasts tank:
- They don’t read the room: They’re too busy telling you the thing they want to say to notice the question the reader brought with them. Have you ever had a conversation with someone who’s truly and deeply self-absorbed? Yeah, don’t write content like that.
- They’re generic: “Insert your problem here” won’t resonate with devs who are knee-deep in actual, messy code. You don’t need an elaborate sample app, but you do need to show that you understand a codebase has history, constraints, and multiple people adding to it, and let’s be honest, fucking it up.
- They make the reader work for the point: Developers don’t need every answer compressed into a slogan. They do need the answer before the preamble eats their afternoon.
Good developer content isn’t a lecture, it’s a useful response. It anticipates the next question instead of saving the point for the final paragraph.
Think of the difference between:
- Broadcast: “Feature X is revolutionary.”
- Conversation: “If you’re trying to test webhooks locally without redeploying every change, Feature X can help. It won’t solve every network problem, but here’s where it fits, what it doesn’t replace, and how to try it.”
One is a claim. The other gives the reader a way to evaluate it.
That is the relationship between conversation and usefulness. The writer isn’t performing attentiveness. They’re making the content accountable to a real problem and a real decision.
The Conversation Test for Developer Content
Before you publish, run the conversation test:
- What real problem or decision is the reader bringing here?
- What context, constraint, or tradeoff do they need before the answer is trustworthy?
- What can they do, test, decide, or read next?
- What feedback would tell you whether the piece landed?
That doesn’t make content formulaic. It keeps you from mistaking polish for usefulness.
1. Start with Actual Problems
Instead of guessing, look at the places developers already describe the work: forums, GitHub issues, support conversations, docs feedback, and the questions your own team keeps answering. Search data can point at a pattern, but it isn’t a substitute for understanding why the problem is expensive or annoying in the first place.
For more on structuring technical content around the problem readers recognize, see Technical Storytelling: Bridging Engineering and Narrative.
2. Keep Context and Tradeoffs Alive
Technical accuracy is table stakes. Context is what makes that accuracy useful. A reader needs to know why the problem exists, what constraint shapes the answer, and where the recommendation stops applying. Otherwise, even a carefully reviewed explanation can feel inert.
That doesn’t mean every post needs the whole system diagram. It means you keep the load-bearing nuance and cut the ornamental detail. Related links help when they offer a genuinely useful next layer, not when they’re a scavenger hunt disguised as a content series.
3. Treat Accuracy as Part of the Relationship
“Human” does not mean casual imprecision. It means being honest about what you know, what the system does, and what the reader should verify for their own situation. A good technical editor helps surface missing context. Subject-matter experts keep claims from wandering off into the woods. The writer makes the logic navigable.
Personality helps. It just can’t carry an answer that doesn’t hold up.
4. Give the Reader a Next Move
Useful content shouldn’t end with the reader thinking, “neat.” It should help them make a decision, try an approach, inspect the docs, ask a sharper question, or move to the next relevant explanation. The next move can be small. It just needs to match the reason they showed up.
This is where a lot of polished developer content quietly fails. It explains a thing and then leaves the reader standing in the parking lot.
That same standard applies to product pages. Workshop, my local-first Mac app for small tools, starts with the narrow jobs its tools do instead of making visitors excavate the point from a feature list.
5. Let the Conversation Continue After Publication
You don’t need comments, AMAs, or an enormous public community to make content conversational. You do need a way to notice what happens after publication: recurring questions, reader confusion, support or sales reuse, deeper clicks, or the gap that the piece exposed.
That feedback belongs in the next brief and the next revision. Otherwise you’re publishing, reporting, and learning absolutely nothing, which is a very expensive hobby. For a framework on whether content changes what people do next, see the content resonance framework. For the systems side of making that learning repeatable, see Content Systems.
The Constant Usefulness Check
Throughout planning, drafting, and review, I come back to one question:
“Does this immediately help someone do their job better, or is it just fancy filler?”
If the answer is no, diagnose what is missing: the real problem, the context or tradeoff, or the next step. Then fix that. Don’t add more adjectives and hope the reader mistakes them for value.
Time to Ditch the Megaphone
Treat developers as the smart, skeptical humans they are. Ditch the megaphone. Before the next brief, draft, or technical explanation goes out, ask whether it answers a real question, preserves the context needed to trust it, and gives the reader a next move.
If it doesn’t, you’re not having a conversation. You’re just publishing at people.