Skip to main content

New Writers Guide now on GitHub

Writing can be a fun and rewarding way to share your knowledge, experience, and opinions with others. Unfortunately, it can also be intimidating or frustrating for some people. When I was managing editor for SitePoint's PHPMaster property, I prepared a guide to help alleviate some of the frustration and self-doubt that new writers (and even experienced writers) might experience.

The guide wasn't something commissioned by SitePoint; I wrote it on my own for my authors. And though it's been about eight months since PHPMaster was absorbed into the main SitePoint site and I stepped down as managing editor, people continue to ask me about it. So, I've decided to make the guide publicly available.

The New Writers Guide offers advice for finding inspiration, structuring an article's content, growing one's self-confidence, and overcoming other challenges that programming writers may face. Hopefully it'll continue to help people write awesome articles and realize the many benefits of writing in their life.

You can find a copy of the guide on GitHub at github.com/tboronczyk/WritersGuide.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Composing Music with PHP

I’m not an expert on probability theory, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. And even my Music 201 class from years ago has been long forgotten. But if you’ll indulge me for the next 10 minutes, I think you’ll find that even just a little knowledge can yield impressive results if creatively woven together. I’d like to share with you how to teach PHP to compose music. Here’s an example: You’re looking at a melody generated by PHP. It’s not the most memorable, but it’s not unpleasant either. And surprisingly, the code to generate such sequences is rather brief. So what’s going on? The script calculates a probability map of melodic intervals and applies a Markov process to generate a new sequence. In friendlier terms, musical data is analyzed by a script to learn which intervals make up pleasing melodies. It then creates a new composition by selecting pitches based on the possibilities it’s observed. . Standing on Shoulders Composition doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Bach wa...

Learning Prolog

I'm not quite sure exactly I was searching for, but somehow I serendipitously stumbled upon the site learnprolognow.org a few months ago. It's the home for an introductory Prolog programming course. Logic programming offers an interesting way to think about your problems; I've been doing so much procedural and object-oriented programming in the past decade that it really took effort to think at a higher level! I found the most interesting features to be definite clause grammars (DCG), and unification. Difference lists are very powerful and Prolog's DCG syntax makes it easy to work with them. Specifying a grammar such as: s(s(NP,VP)) --> np(NP,X,Y,subject), vp(VP,X,Y). np(np(DET,NBAR,PP),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y), pp(PP). np(np(DET,NBAR),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y). np(np(PRO),X,Y,Z) --> pro(PRO,X,Y,Z). vp(vp(V),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y). vp(vp(V,NP),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y), np(NP,_,_,object). nbar(nbar(JP),X,3) --> jp(JP,X). pp(pp(PREP,N...

Does Esperanto-USA have a Transparency Problem?

I’ve been an active member of Esperanto-USA for many years, even serving on its board of directors. I wanted to help build a strong, healthy national organization that effectively promotes Esperanto in the United States. But when I stepped down from the board, that desire didn’t end. I continued to bring problems to the attention of the organization, ranging from member rights to strategy to proper governance. I’ve decided to be public about this latest issue because of its seriousness and because of how the board has been secretive about it. The membership deserves to know what is done in their name. What Happened In November 2025, the board of Esperanto-USA sent a formal letter to Esperanto-Ligo en Israelo (ELI) with a copy to UEA, concerning an article published in ELI’s bulletin. The article, written by Eduardo Topol, contained inflammatory political content. And although I agree that the article was extremely offensive, the board’s decision to inj...