Write for Data Engineer Things

How to contribute to Data Engineer Things

Data Engineer Things (DET) is an online publication and community dedicated to curating original learning resources for data engineers. Our audience ranges from aspirational data engineers to experienced data leaders.

If you are also passionate about data engineering and want to share your knowledge with the community, consider writing for DET!

We are looking for all types of stories on data engineering, for example (and definitely not limited to):

• 🔖 Career stories: Transitioning into DE from another field
• 🔖 Interviews: Preparing for data engineering interviews
• 🔖 Project ideas: A data modeling exercise with Netflix data on Kaggle
• 🔖 Tech stacks: Building a batch/streaming pipeline on AWS
• 🔖 Soft skills: Effective communication with stakeholders
• 🔖 Engineering: Integrating CICD into data engineering dev cycle
• 🔖 The Overlooked: How to design systems for high data quality
• 🔖 … and so much more!

How to contribute

1. Fill out this form to apply to be a writer for DET
2. Once you are added as a writer, you can directly submit blog drafts to DET to be reviewed by our editors (How to Submit).
3. The reviewing process typically takes up to a week.

Submission rules

Before your blog post is published:

• We follow Medium’s Quality Standards to ensure that only high-quality and original blog posts are published on DET. If your content doesn’t meet our standards, we will not publish it on DET.
• All content must be original. Don’t repost other writers’ content and claim it as yours. We also don’t accept AI-generated content.
• We don’t publish content that’s mainly for marketing or advertising. (Please read the FAQs section below for more information regarding marketing content.)
• Our editors may directly make minor edits to your content (e.g. correcting grammar mistakes and improving formatting).

After your blog post is published:

• You can still make minor updates to the content. You may remove it from DET at any time.
• We may also remove your blog post from DET for any reason. If we do so, your content will still be available on Medium.

Content promotion

We promote content published on DET in many ways:

• DET is one of the few publications selected for the Boost Nomination Pilot Program — meaning our editors can submit stories for a boost so that your writing can be seen by more audiences!
• LinkedIn Posts on Data Engineer Things page
• Shared within the DET Slack community
• Highlighted on the DET newsletter

We also encourage our writers to post their content on LinkedIn too to build their personal brands:

• Include a short summary of your blog post and relevant tags (e.g. #dataengineering #data) to reach the right audience.
• Include the link to your blog post in the comment (because LinkedIn doesn’t like external links in the main post.)
• (Optional) Tag Data Engineer Things or Xinran Waibel for better reach.
• See a LinkedIn post example here.

Tips for writers

1. Use a grammar checker such as Grammarly for proofreading.
2. Always include the source for the images used if you didn’t create them yourselves. Looking for pretty images to use, try Unslpash.
3. Add subtitles to your blog posts.
4. Choose relevant topics to better promote your content within Medium. Some of the most popular tags for our audience: data engineering, data science, data, technology.
5. Set up your Medium profile: use a professional profile photo, bio, and include a link to your LinkedIn profile, etc.

Recommended articles on technical writing

• Technical Writing Guide: Emphasizing Personal Experiences with Callouts
• Technical Writing Guide: Adding Links
• Technical Writing Guide: Compelling Titles and Subtitles

FAQs

Q: How can I write about data products? What kind of content is categorized as marketing or advertising?

It’s totally common to discuss frameworks or tools in our blog posts. For example, we have many articles on Apache Spark optimization. These types of articles do not fall into the marketing category for a few reasons:

• The frameworks discussed are open-sourced and they are widely used in the industry (another good example is Apache Kafka.)
• The main purpose of the content is to educate, rather than to sell.
• The authors are not affiliated with the companies behind them.

But what if you want to write about new data products? For example, a new open-source data orchestration tool that also has a priced version or a new data analytics platform offered by a major cloud provider.

We do review blog posts that introduce new tools but we work with our authors on the narrative and the tone of the articles to avoid promotional information before publishing. A few tips include:

• Instead of laser-focusing on the features of the new tool, talk about alternative tools and their pros/cons.
• Instead of listing the benefits of the new tool, talk about the common technical challenges and how this tool helped solve them.
• Avoid using superlatives such as “best” and “fastest” or promotional tones such as “OMG this tool completely blew my mind!”
• Avoid including company logos without context.

Any questions? Leave a comment to let us know!