Introducing Write for Timescale

Let’s share the power of data with the world, one tutorial at a time 🎉.

Hello Timescale Community!

If you’re in software engineering, data science, or a related field, I want to invite you to our new “Write for Timescale” program. We know so many developers and members of our community are passionate about using data to build applications, gain insight into their world, and make better decisions. And, we want to give people the opportunity to share that passion with others.

That’s where you come in. Because we don’t believe in asking anyone to work for free and value your time, we’ll pay market rate for technical tutorials that showcase how you can use the features of TimescaleDB in an interesting and educational way. Examples include our recent COVID-19 post on the Timescale blog and my COVID-19 post for the DEV community of readers.

I was the principal author for both these posts, and let me assure you that, as Timescale’s VP of Marketing, I am almost certainly not as technical as you. If you’re an experienced developer, your technical skills are superior to mine and your ability to learn and use TimescaleDB will far exceed my own.

Put simply, TimescaleDB is designed to be easy to learn, easy to use, and easy to maintain. You can pick it up in a matter of minutes and be off and running, and we’d love to have you detail your experiences along the way.

Submission process

Complete the proposal form, and we’ll review your submission and reach out with questions and next steps.

You can assume that the reader is a developer who is familiar with command-line instructions, git, databases, and a commonly used web programming language, such as Python, Javascript, or Ruby.

Final submissions must be:

• Written in English, requiring only minimal grammatical editing (we’ll work with you to polish, but submissions must be generally well-written).
• Detailed technical walkthroughs (2000+ words) that provide insight into topics not currently covered by our documentation.
• “Tutorial” in nature, with step-by-step instructions that are easy to follow and reproduce.
• Original work. No writing may commence prior to approval from Timescale.

In our experience, the highest performing submissions use public datasets to solve interesting problems or gain unique insight into a topic of general interest.

• Within our own documentation, we often cite NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission data, cryptocurrency data, or Prometheus infrastructure monitoring data.
• If you’d like to skip setting up datasets and reuse one of those three existing datasets, your tutorial can reference an existing tutorial and proceed with more advanced topics (see our Grafana tutorial as an example).

Prior to issuing payment, submissions are subject to our editing and approval process.

To get started, you can sign up for and use Timescale Cloud for free (includes 30 day trial w/ $300 in free credits). If you’re an existing Timescale Cloud customer and/or require additional credits, we’ll happily supply them to support your “Write for Timescale” work.

Submit your proposal

If you’re interested and have a topic you think is a great fit, or know someone who might want to submit a proposal, let us know via this form.

• Not sure if your topic is suitable? Submit what you’re thinking and let us be the judge - we bet you’re on the right track.
• We’ll promptly review all submissions and get back to you as quickly as we can.

We look forward to hearing from you!