Hack Your Next Hacker Noon Top Story with these Writing Prompts

Stuck on your next big tech story idea? Use the suggestions in this article to spark brilliance.

How to Get Featured on the Homepage of HackerNoon

If you want to write a story that'll definitely get featured atop the homepage of hackernoon.com, you might try taking a look at past top stories, and brainstorm story ideas from the following angles:

1. Your Personal Experience
   (e.g. Being a Student Founder Ain't Easy);
   
2. Your Perspective on Current Events
   (e.g. The CEO of My Company, Genius, Must Be Black); or
   
3. Your Technical Expertise
   (e.g. How NOT To Fracture A Layer 1 Chain!).

BONUS TIP: Hacker Noon's Editors love long-form insights.

Aim to create a top story that's also evergreen content.

Take the time to perform a real deep-dive into a niche subject.

For example:

1. Write about the processes involved in getting a tech job
   (50+ Data Structure and Algorithms Interview Questions for Programmers);
   
2. Share your meatiest tech career development advice
   (6 Essential Tips on How to Become a Full Stack Developer); or
   
3. Write up a quick tutorial about the last useful thing you learned and/or Googled
   (Copying text to clipboard with JavaScript).

In Summary:

1. To write a Hacker Noon top story, write over 800 words about a personal experience in the tech world; your (well-researched) views on what's happening in the world; or your technical knowledge.
   
   
2. To write a Hacker Noon top story that has staying power, write over 1,000 words about tech career development, or (do your SEO keyword research) and write up a quick dev tutorial post with broad appeal.

*This list of ways to get featured atop the homepage of hackernoon.com is by no means exhaustive.

As with all things, there are also

• outliers (Laziness Chapter I: Meta-Programming);
• failures (How and Why My First Five Startups Failed);
• checklists and listicles (🚀 Ultimate Startup Launch Checklist: 2020 Edition 🚀); and
• interesting conversations to be had (Interview with Chatroulette Founder Andrey Ternovskiy).

✨ Use your imagination! ✨

Hey Hacker, Where Are You Right Now?

Not to humblebrag too hard or anything, but we got hackers in diff'rent area codes.

Not to mention our highly distributed team — check out our new about page to meet everybody. 👋

From Africa (6 Lessons Learned Fundraising for Our Startup in Africa) to India (Identifying The Poor in India: A Data Driven Analysis) and Ukraine (Product is the King: How Ukrainian Engineers Are Creating Home Security Products) — localized content wins because people are always somewhere.

Hacker Noon people, in particular, are everywhere:

Research and write about what's happening in tech right now, from the perspective of where you are located.

Take a Look at Hacker Noon's Top Tag Pages

Let yourself get lost in (and inspired by) the words of writers who have written good words before you.

Find a future-facing story that intrigues you and write a response post from your personal perspective.

Hey, while you're at it, why not collect and analyse some data about the kinds of headlines published in your niche on Hacker Noon, and then write a post about that? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

BONUS TIP 02: Make sure you're in-the-know about which tags we're featuring below-the-fold on the homepage of hackernoon.com that month. Aim to write something worthy of being featured in one or more of those tag categories.

If It Bleeds, It Leads

As in bleeding-edge technology, please.

It pays to read tech news.

Listen to podcasts.

Know what's up.

Whether you want to

1. share your personal story in relation to a newsworthy topic
   (How I Lost Trust in Facebook);
   
2. offer practical advice related to a rising global trend
   (Remote Work's Hierarchy of Needs; Is Your Zoom Meeting Really End-to-End Encrypted?);
   
3. offer your unique/technical/legal perspective on the headlines everybody's talking about
   (President Trump’s Social Media Executive Order Would Restrict Legal Protections for Internet Speech); or
   
4. build a concept app for something Elon Musk may or may not need in the near future
   (I Built a Neuralink App Concept After Elon Musk’s Latest Joe Rogan Podcast),

we'd be happy to publish it.

Finally: Republish Your Blog, Brand or Startup's Content on Hacker Noon

Little known fact: you can republish content on Hacker Noon, yes, even if already it was published elsewhere first.

Click through for four fun facts you need to know about republishing on Hacker Noon, if that's the route you want to follow.

BONUS TIP 03: We're reshuffling things over at community.hackernoon.com: get involved now for further writing prompts, writer resources, tech news round-ups, and more!

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
— Sylvia Plath —

You can write about the results of a Twitter poll you did on whether people buy tech or progress.

You can write a Pseudo-Mathematical Proof of All Things Being Skills You Can Get Better At and fill the post with Rick Rolls, if you want.

You can rant about why Larry Wall's "Three Virtues of a Programmer" are Utter Bullshit, even.

The key

is simply

to

start writing.