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Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

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Author Guidelines for InfoQ Articles

Through our articles, we aim to help facilitate the spread of knowledge and innovation in professional software development. To do this, we tend to focus on software trends that innovators and early adopters are adopting.

We focus on technical articles written by domain experts. InfoQ readers are senior software engineers, software architects, and team leads typically from Enterprise and mid-sized companies who influence the adoption of innovations and practices. They look to InfoQ for high-quality technical articles that:

  • Help them with technical challenges, patterns and practices
  • Understand and validate use-cases
  • Shares valuable learnings and experiences from their peers
  • Helps them validate their software roadmap by learning about new trends
  • Helps them understand what should be on the radar, and what shouldn’t
  • Identifies clear next steps (actions and signposting)

Community and Audience

While software development may constitute a portion of our readers’ overall responsibilities, they often wear multiple hats within their teams. Here are some of their primary day-to-day activities:

  • Technical Team Lead
  • Overseeing development testing/QA
  • Helping dev teams adopt TDD, BDD and good refactoring practices
  • Project management: Ensuring projects are delivered on time and within scope
  • Overseeing integration of cross-departmental and B2B systems
  • Overseeing operations and ensuring system up-time
  • Application design & architecture
  • Requirements management: Gathering customer requirements and translating these into technical specifications
  • Staying on top of new trends and software technologies so they can provide technical direction internally
  • Learning about a range of technologies to guide team development

Personas and Topics

InfoQ focuses on the professional software development market,from top-level architecture and design to development, deployment and delivery. InfoQ considers each of these in terms of personas. Each persona represents the role the reader serves in their professional work. InfoQ's personas are:

  • Development
  • Architecture and Design
  • AI, ML and Data Engineering
  • Culture and Methods
  • DevOps

Within these personas are topics of interest. A list of trending topics by persona can be found on the InfoQ home page. Simply hover over a persona to see the correlated topics. So you'll find Java, Kotlin, .NET, C#, Swift, Rust, Go, JavaScript and other language topics under our development persona. Under AI, ML and Data Engineering, you'll find articles on artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, streaming and so on.

InfoQ's editorial coverage focuses on the technologies within the innovator and early adopter phases of the "Diffusion of Innovations" theory, as well as those in the process of "crossing the chasm". We cover the movement of technologies through these stages in our InfoQ Trends Report (here’s an example of our InfoQ Trends Report). We also cover trends in the established major languages and runtimes such as Java and .NET.

Length

Feature-length articles range between 1,500 words and 4,000 words, but average between 2,000 and 3,000 words. Below are guidelines for writing InfoQ quality articles along with the requirements for proposing and submitting articles.

Writing Style

Write your article in a conversational voice, as if you were explaining your concepts to a colleague or peer. Assume your readers have extensive knowledge and they do not need introductory concepts explained. Do not pad your articles with excessive descriptions; please be as concise as possible. Use bullet points to quickly summarize key points. Your readers will appreciate it as it will help them scan articles.

Proposals

Please note that all contributed content we publish must be original. We do not publish posts that were already published somewhere else on the Internet.

Send your full article or abstract/ outline at editors@infoq.com and a member of our editorial staff will get in contact with you related to your proposal.

If you have already written your article, simply submit the draft and we will evaluate it.

If you have not already written your first draft, you can send a first outline of the proposed article with a 1-line summary for each section before going forward. The outline and abstract need not be formal, but they should convey enough information for the editorial team to easily evaluate your idea.

Please include:

  • The proposed title
  • Topic focus
  • The target reader for the article
  • Technologies and tools discussed in the article
  • Any case studies and uses cases you may cover
  • Any code examples you will include
  • 5 key takeaways of the article (the most relevant information in the article summarized in 5 sentences)
  • The timeframe in which you plan to submit your completed draft
  • A brief (one paragraph) biography
  • Author contact information. InfoQ would have to be in direct contact with the authors, as we don't publish content on someone’s behalf without their written confirmation first.

Do your best to define specific takeaways from the article. A reader of your article should be able to walk away with a set of actions to perform, a new theory to think about, or a thought-provoking question to answer.

Once we receive your proposal, we'll review it and provide feedback on its suitability for InfoQ's audience.

Our review process has 2 stages:

  • Initial review – to approve the article in concept. It usually takes within 5 business days for the article to receive a go/no go from our editors.
  • Deeper review – if the article gets accepted after initial review. Upon acceptance of your proposal, we will pair you with a technical reviewer. They will perform a deeper review of the article substance and provide you with iterative feedback. The duration of this process depends on the number of iterations/changes needed between the author and the assigned reviewer to bring the article to the final form. As soon as the article reaches the final form, it is scheduled for publishing.

You will find a list of articles published on our site here: InfoQ articles

Submission and Formatting Guidelines

InfoQ articles are formatted for online reading according to our in-house style. Therefore it is important not to send preformatted documents with complex formatting. Articles can be submitted in plain text, Word, Pages, Markdown or as a Google Doc. Our editors will remove formatting basic rules (such as font styles) from the text and format it according to our style.

Your document may contain tables, lists and other elements. Tables will be converted to HTML tables. Numbered or bulleted lists will be converted to HTML ordered or unordered lists.

Images may be embedded in the document or submitted separately as a JPEG. Images submitted in other formats (such as Tiff) will be converted to JPEG. Diagrams created in a vector graphics program should likewise be output as an image. If you have any questions, please contact the editor working with you.

For educational articles www.infoq.com/articles, we require exclusive publishing rights for a 4 weeks period, from the initial date of publishing.

After this period of time, authors are free to publish the material elsewhere, such as on their personal sites, blogs or other platforms, provided they include a link back to InfoQ that states "This article was originally published on InfoQ on [date]"

InfoQ copyright statement

  • InfoQ respects the moral rights of any author, therefore the authors will retain the copyright for any content produced while InfoQ will retain the distribution rights.
  • InfoQ will remove any article if the author requests that InfoQ do so.
  • InfoQ does not agree to any third party reposting in its entirety any work such as but not limited to article/interview/news/presentation/mini-book that appears on InfoQ. We permit the posting of a summary and then a link back to the InfoQ landing page.
  • As the holder of distribution rights, InfoQ is authorized to act on the copyright owner’s behalf to pursue copyright infringements from sites that are copying the content without our permission.
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