How to Write Insightful Technical Articles

, I discuss how you can write technical articles. I have been writing such articles for around 2.5 years, and I’ll go through my experiences, how you can find your own niche, and what you need to remember when writing an article.

The goal of this article is to teach about technical writing and the different types of technical articles. Furthermore, I’ll discuss the enormous benefits I’ve had from writing and some lessons I’ve learned from my writing.

You can also read my article on Benchmarking LLMs and check out my website, which contains all my information and articles.

Table of Contents

Motivation

My motivation for this article is that I have been writing articles for about 2.5 years. I decided to reflect a bit on my writing journey and why writing technical articles is one of the best decisions I have made so far in my career.

• Learning the topics better: The best way of learning is to teach others. This is essentially what you’re doing when writing technical articles.
• Networking: You get to connect with a lot of readers of your articles and other writers doing the same as you. This presents opportunities both for gaining a following and learning from others.
• Monitization: If you have enough readers, writing is also a way of economically supporting yourself, though I preface that this should not be your primary motivation to start writing.

I believe the first point on learning topics outweighs any other benefit I’ve had from writing. Writing provides an avenue to both teach others about a topic and simultaneously further deepen your knowledge on a topic. Teaching others is the best way to learn something yourself.

I find it incredibly rewarding to write an article to teach others while also further enhancing my understanding of a topic through writing about it. I truly reckon this to be one of the greatest parts of practicing technical writing, and a significant reason I recommend that you also write technical articles.

Types of technical articles

• “How to …” programming articles
• Testing/reporting on new releases
• Teach about a topic

“How to” articles

A how-to article is an article detailing how to do something within programming. It could be as specific as how to utilize a particular Python package, or as vague as how to use context engineering. These are the kinds of articles I prefer to write, as they fit both within what I enjoy writing about and the kinds of articles I receive the inspiration to write about. For example, I utilize a new framework in a project, or learn about a topic (for example, context engineering), and write a specific article on how to utilize the framework, or how to do something specific within the topic.

Testing new releases

A lot of technical articles also focus on testing out and reporting on new releases. Lately, most of these revolve around testing new LLM models, such as the recent Qwen 3 release or Grok 4. I regularly read such articles to stay on top of everything happening in the AI space and to understand the performance of different models. I also tried writing such articles myself for a while, but I found it a bit monotone.

Teaching about a topic

Another common technical article is one teaching about a specific topic. These articles usually cover wider areas than the “how-to” articles, but can be enormously helpful. These kinds of articles can be introductory articles to a topic, a deep dive article for experienced readers, or anything in between. I usually read such articles when getting into a new topic, or to stay on top of topics I’m particularly interested in. You should note that these articles are often very time-consuming to make, but they often represent some of the highest-quality articles I read online.

Finding your niche

When writing, it’s essential to find your niche. Finding your niche involves finding the types of articles:

• You enjoy writing (and you’re good at writing)
• Your readers enjoy reading

Your niche can be super specific (i.e., only Python AI tutorials), or it can cast a wider net, such as “How-to” tutorials for AI.

To find your own niche, I recommend you try writing the different article types I listed in the last section. The most important aspect is to find something you enjoy writing about. This can, of course, also change over time. After finding what you enjoy writing about, you need to start writing articles regularly. I write around once a week, which I think is a good balance between consistently sharing my knowledge online, while also avoiding creative burnout by writing too often.

Furthermore, I also find that it is usually much easier to write about topics on which you have some background knowledge. For me, for example, I write mostly about AI, which I work with every day at my full-time job. This gives me a lot of background information, which is useful for the article, and provides me with inspiration for topics to write about.

My learnings

Improvements for each article

I’ve learned a lot through writing for 2.5 years. I see vast improvements between my first article and my current articles. My goal has always been to try to improve something specific for each article. This way, I can see considerable improvements over a series of articles. Thus, my first learning is to try to improve something in each article you write.

List of ideas

The ideas for my article usually come from topics I work on, as well as reading LinkedIn, X, and Medium. I then learn more about the topics and write an article on them. Ideas can come at any time, whether it be while scrolling social media or while taking a walk. I thus recommend keeping a list of different ideas you want to write about. I keep this list in Google Keep, so I can access it both via my phone and computer.

When I then sit down on Sundays to write an article, I can choose one from my list of ideas. I find this much simpler than having to come up with a topic to write about on the spot.

Article outline

After I chose my idea to write about, I created an outline for the article. I find that this makes the article easier to read (the content is more coherent), and it’s easier for me to have an overview while writing the article. I do this by first writing down all the headers and subheaders in my article, before writing anything else. This helps me scope what to include and exclude in my article, and makes it easier to keep the red thread in the article. You can naturally add or remove headlines later on, but I find that initially writing down all the headlines makes the writing process easier and the output better.

While writing, I also try to interrupt the process as little as possible. For example, suppose I think of something I have to include in the article while writing (for example, an article I want to refer to). In that case, I write “TODO to find the article to refer to here” in my article, and then continue writing. After finishing the article, I then came back to this TODO and did the task. This way, you avoid an interruption. I recommend minimizing the number of interruptions while writing because it takes quite a bit of time to get into the writing rhythm again after being interrupted. Keeping the interruptions to a minimum makes you a much more efficient writer, while you can also remember everything you need to do, using the TODOs.

Checklist

Another important learning I made is to maintain a checklist of everything you need to do for each article. There are a lot of different things you need to remember to do, and simply maintaining a checklist you fill out for each article ensures you remember everything. My checklist, for example, includes:

• Add featured image, subtitle, excerpt, tags, and category
• Go through the article with Grammarly for spell check
• Ensure all code in the article has syntax highlighting
• Share the post on LinkedIn and X
• …

Publisher

I also highly recommend finding a publisher for your articles. This could be a publication on Medium or a separate site such as Towards Data Science. Having a publisher ensures a lot more people view your article, which is essential both for your motivation when writing and for sharing your knowledge with as many people as possible.

Keep writing

I genuinely believe consistency is one of the most important factors when writing. You should find a specific interval you can maintain over a period of time. It could be once a month, once a week, or any other interval you prefer. You should then try to stick to that schedule over time, while improving one element of your articles each time. Over time, you will find that your articles vastly improve, and more people are reading your content.

Conclusion

In this article, I have discussed how to write technical articles. I discussed the different types of technical articles you can find online and how you can find your own niche when writing. I believe writing provides enormous benefits, not only for the people reading, but also for the author explaining a topic. This is also the reason I have kept writing over the years. Lastly, I discussed some of my own learnings from writing, such as keeping a consistent writing schedule, maintaining a checklist for each article, and finding a publisher.

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