The developer tooling space doesn’t follow the rules of traditional marketing as we typically understand them. Developers don’t like feeling like they’re being sold to. They prefer a more organic process where trust in a tool grows through their engagement with the community—whether that’s contributing to open-source projects or creating valuable content on their blogs (a form of content marketing). When I think about tools I’ve come to trust, like Posthog, Fly.io, or more recently Depot, what they share is a knack for producing great content.
While we should keep using our blog to share product updates and plans, I think we should double down on content that resonates with the community—and, by extension, with search engines and LLM crawlers aiming to stay relevant across different spaces. I created this category to brainstorm topic ideas we could explore. Feel free to suggest topics you’d like us to cover or that you think are relevant today.
I believe it’s crucial that we dive deep into any topic we write about, truly understanding and sharing insights on the subject. Take NSHipster as an example—their blog posts are gifts to the community. If people value the content we create, they’ll trust us more and might consider using Tuist when the need arises.
Apart from Tuist-specific blog posts, I think topics should come about primarily by two ways:
There’s a new announcement in the space. We should jump on these and provide our perspective. I feel the Swift Build blog post resonated well with the community.
Pick topics that we’re touching on as we’re working on the product. Adding support for MCP? Let’s write a blog post about that. Contributed to swift-package-manager? Blog post! (I really should get on that ) Got an interesting question or do we see a common pattern, such as dynamic vs static frameworks? That’s a great topic!
I’d love our posts to come about naturally. But we can definitely flag ideas here whenever we see an opportunity when working on something, reviewing a PR, etc. I would not be doing deep explorations into technical topics just for the sake of writing a post when it’s unrelated to our work.
Some additional ideas I’ve had lately:
expectedSignature of XCFrameworks in Xcode projects and their impact on security: XCFramework: support signature. by TamarMilchtaich · Pull Request #7411 · tuist/tuist · GitHub (we can also reach out to see if they would be interested in doing a guest post) I think in general, we have a lot of opportunities to write posts about niche things in Xcode. That’s where a lot of our expertise is.
We can talk about how to use Mise built-in functionality and Swift macros to pass and obfuscate sensitive information at built-time, and expose it only from CI environments.
We can write a post about the new Swift Testing traits. We can rewrite some of our acceptance tests with these and then write a post about how we did that and what the experience was.
I recently came across this post by PostHog about SEO for early-stage startups, and I think there are perfect ideas in it that are worth calling out and remembering as we invest in writing content for our blog. Here’s the list in no concrete order:
The depth of the content matters. It’s tempting to write many shallow posts fast to feed the rhythm of algorithms, but developers build more long-lasting connections with companies that produce content that sustains the test of time. Safe Ecto Migrations is a good example. In the Swift and iOS ecosystem, NSHipster and objc.io come to my mind. Their blog posts are a joy to read.
Type of content. They mention their split is ⅓ SEO articles, ⅓ tutorials, ⅓ anything goes.
Not outsource. This was already clear to me, but worth remembering. Although it might sound like a best usage of a company’s money, outsourced content might not be as effective as content written in-house from deep experience in a subject. Developers might read it as “they throw money at someone to talk about topic X”. They build trust though the companies’ expertise and openness, not through paying someone, often to talk about the company itself.
Paid adds and sponsorships might be useful. They recommend Google for conversion and the rest, Reddit and LinkedIn for example for awareness. Moreover, they mention that newsletters can be quite effective, but you should go on and off (e.g. 3 months of sponsoring and then 3 months of not sponsoring) changing the message. Also if we ever invest in YouTube, we should bear in mind that:
Most dev-focused content on YouTube is for people learning to code, so beware.
Regarding sponsoring events: Sponsoring events is disproportionately expensive – and if your name appears on the same level as Google’s, you are definitely wasting your money. So we should choose wisely which events to sponsor. I’d suggest that we focus on the ones that are emerging and present us with an opportunity to build a long-lasting relationship.
) Got an interesting question or do we see a common pattern, such as dynamic vs static frameworks? That’s a great topic!
I think in general, we have a lot of opportunities to write posts about niche things in Xcode. That’s where a lot of our expertise is.