Blogging Overview

Introduction

In this lesson, we discuss how to write good blog posts that meet Flatiron School's requirements.

Objectives

This lesson covers...

• Why blogging is valuable
• Topics to blog about
• What makes for a good blog post
• How to start your blog
• Flatiron School blog requirements

Why Should I Blog?

Blogging has many benefits:

• Develop your written communication skills. Your writing ability will be critical to your success when completing job applications and presenting your work to colleagues. Blogging is great practice for identifying and clearly communicating the most important points of any subject.

• Demonstrate your talent to employers. Potential employers will review your blog to determine whether to offer you an interview or a job. Some students have even been invited to interview or exempted from technical interviews based on their blogs.

• Strengthen your knowledge. Blogging helps you explore new topics, deepen your understanding, and crystallize what you've learned.

• Help your peers and the broader community. Have you ever Googled a question you had and found the answer on a blog? Writing blog posts helps others who are following in your footsteps!

What Should I Blog About?

Here are some blog topic ideas:

• Why did you decide to learn data science?

• Describe how a DS technique works, when you might use it, and its strengths/weaknesses.

• Summarize an End of Phase Project by explaining your problem, the dataset, your methodology, and your results.

• Dive into something that you want to learn more about, maybe because you find it challenging or it wasn't covered in the course.

• Write a tutorial to help aspiring data scientists to implement a tool or method.

• Find an interesting data science paper and summarize why it is important. This can be a new paper from the past few months, or you can refer to this spreadsheet.

What Does A Good Blog Post Look Like?

We recommend you take a look at our blog templates and examples to get an idea for what makes a blog post good.

• Strike a balance between providing a meaningful investigation of your topic and being concise. Constrain the scope so it will be interesting and digestible in about 1000-3000 words (this is not a firm limit).

• Use clear and consistent formatting to make your content accessible and professional-looking.

  • When presenting code, use code snippets instead of screenshots.
  • Make URLs into hyperlinks that are easy for readers to click into.
  • Use headings to provide structure and flow to your post.

• Cite and link to resources you used to write your post.

How Do I Start My Blog?

If you already have a professional blog that you'd like to use for your data science content, you can add your posts to that. Otherwise, you will need to start a new blog. If you have a personal blog, you should avoid using it for this purpose so that you can continue using it for personal content without worrying about how it might be perceived by potential employers.

There are multiple blogging platforms to choose from that make it easy to start a blog, here are some of our favorites:

• Blogger
• dev.to
• GitHub Pages
• Medium
• Wordpress

Different platforms have different pros and cons, so do a little research to decide what is best for you.

Blog Requirements

To succeed in your career transition and graduate from Flatiron School, you must complete the following activities. These requirements are designed to give you the best opportunity to deepen your knowledge, practice communication skills, and showcase yourself to potential employers.

• Set up a publicly accessible blog

• Publish at least four blog posts on it, including one per Phase for Phases 1-4

• Submit URLs to your posts by the end of each Phase in the Blog Post assignments

  • These assignments are located in the Milestones topics of the Phase 1-4 Canvas courses

• Write blog posts that...

  • Discuss data science topics
  • Are composed primarily of original material you wrote
  • Include proper attribution
  • Have high-quality content and formatting
  • Are something you would proudly show to a potential employer

After you submit your blog posts, your teacher will grade them as Complete or Incomplete. Your blogs must all be submitted on time and receive Complete grades in order to continue through your program.

✨Have fun and happy blogging!✨