Your First Contribution to NativeScript: A Blog Post

Several weeks ago, we launched the NativeScript First-Time Contribution Program. Since then we heard about awesome things our community members are doing to share their success with the framework. This blog post is part of a series that aims to help everyone jump on this ship and find his own way to tell his NativeScript story. 

One of the easiest ways to join the NativeScript Contribution Program is to write a blog post. It may sound much scarier than it actually is, so I would to give you some tips and tricks and show how easy it could be.

The Topic

I’ve found out that for me it’s far harder to start something than to finish it. If there was a statistics about why people don’t blog - I bet the most frequent answer would be “I don’t know what to write about.” or even worse “I don’t have anything interesting to share”. What an illusion! Everyone has a lot of interesting things to share, it’s just that most of the time we don’t realize it. Speaking about the NativeScript, it can be as simple as telling about your last project - what is it about and what was your experience with NativeScript. If you stumbled upon a technical issue and managed to resolve it - that’s another great idea for a blog post. For example, check out this excellent article by Ryan Pendergast about working with FontAwesome in NativeScript. If there is a technology or a topic that you have deep dived a lot - this can be an opportunity for a whole series, like Mira’s series on Webpack. In other words - a case study, a HOWTO or a deep dive technical blog post - it all matters.

The Writing

Once you picked the topic and you know what is the actual message that you want to deliver to your readers - it’s time to roll up the sleeves and write it down. Writing in an interesting and engaging way is a whole science on its own, but happily - you don’t need to be Steven King to write a compelling article about NativeScript (although I’ll be really happy to read a real horror story featuring mobile development 👻). You can just follow these tips and tricks to:

• use bullet points when enumerating important items
• use bold to highlight and emphasize words
• use headings and paragraph to give structure to your article and add visual cues for what will be covered in the blog post
• a pictures worths a thousand words, a video worths a thousand pictures (or at least 24 pics per second). Especially, when you want to describe behavior in your application - adding media can be helpful. It will also make your blog post more engaging for reading.

Publishing

So, you have the topic and the content is ready to be published. But where? We as engineers tend to overcomplicate this - I personally spent days researching the best blogging platform, hosting, domains and what not. Nowadays, there are platforms like Medium that give you all the infrastructure needed and allows you to focus on the things that matter - the content. Especially, if you are an occasional blogger - setting up everything on your own just doesn’t worth it, having in mind all the excellent free alternatives. If you believe the topic is particularly interesting for the broad NativeScript audience - you can always get in touch with us and we will be happy to have you as a guest blogger in the NativeScript Blog.

Writing can be challenging, but it is also a rewarding process. It will help you to put your thoughts in order and probably realize facts that you knew but didn’t give a thought on them. Find a cozy place, grab a cup of coffee and unleash your inspiration. And after you are done - don’t forget to enroll in the Contribution Program.