Write for Better Stack Community

Better Stack is an observability company that combines monitoring, logging, incident management and status pages with collaboration tools to help developers and businesses build more reliable software.

To aid us with our mission, we’re building the Better Stack Community with the aim of becoming the best library of guides to help developers make the most reliable apps and it is already being read by tens of thousands of developers every month!

We are currently looking for contributing writer-developers to help us create high-quality guides on building high-performance and scalable applications, observability, and DevOps. If you are a developer, and you love writing and sharing your knowledge with the world, you’ve come to the right place.

Why write for Better Stack Community?

1. We’re open to your ideas

We are generally looking for authors who have their own ideas on topics they want to write about, who can propose topics and follow through quickly. Looking at our existing guides and article wishlist is a great way to understand the kind of topics we like to cover and how we cover them.

Please note that, as a general rule, we are not looking for current news or trendy content as there are plenty of other outlets for such content on the net. We’re more interested in in-depth guides and how-to articles that cover an important aspect of building or scaling production applications.

2. We’ll compensate you well

We realise producing high quality content is hard work so we are prepared to:

Pay you a suitable compensation for your efforts (currently $300/article). This can go up significantly for contributors who establish a track record of good writing and on-time contribution over time.
Publish each contribution under your name with your image and bio clearly featured.
Send you some awesome Better Stack swag!

3. We’ll support you throughout the process

Throughout the topic ideation and writing process, you will work one-on-one with an editor who will provide detailed feedback on your work, and edits to your draft all the way till publication. We will also assist you in promoting your article once it’s live.

4. You’re free to republish the content on your blog

We ask that you grant Better Stack exclusive rights to publish your work for a period of two weeks after publication. Thereafter, the article is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0) and you may republish it however you wish (on a personal blog for example) as long as correct attribution (we prefer a canonical link) is provided and it is not used for commercial purposes.

5. No deadlines

We don’t set strict deadlines but we generally aim to publish an article within a month or two of approval.

What we’re looking for

Original, and well researched content that is a significant improvement on all other existing articles on the same topic.
In-depth how-tos or guides that contain sufficient examples for how to apply the described concepts in real world situations.
Excellent English writing skills.
Sufficient expertise in one or more of the following technologies: Go, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, Java, Python, Elixir, Rust (and other popular languages), as well as Linux and DevOps tools (such as Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, etc).

What we are not looking for

Beginner-level articles, as our audience are mostly mid and senior-level developers.
Newsy articles based on some recent event.
Rehashed content from your past writings.
Topics that cannot be tied to production use-cases.
Content that needs a lot of editing.

The contribution process

Before becoming a guest author, we will ask that you sign a simple agreement for legal reasons. Afterward, we will provide you with a dedicated GitHub repository where all our article processes are encapsulated. The general process is like this:

You submit an article idea.
We review and approve the article (or reject it if it’s not a good fit).
You write the article (in markdown).
We review the draft and provide feedback accordingly.
You update your draft based on the feedback.
After the final draft is received, we edit your draft for grammar and clarity.
You review the edits and approve it (or make changes if you don’t like something).
You get paid and we schedule your article for publication (usually within two weeks of approval).
You can submit another idea immediately.

How to apply

Check out our current guides to get an idea of what we are looking for.
Fill the application form accordingly. You’ll need to tell us a little about yourself and include links to 2-3 of your previous articles that demonstrate your expertise and writing ability.

We will evaluate your application within a week and get back to you. If we think it could be a fit, we will schedule an intro call and chat about how we can work together!

Thanks for reading, and looking forward to hearing from you!

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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