Write a blog post
- blog posts in general are very appreciated by software devs. (I used to spend ages reading them when I was working as a dev to keep up on state of the art)
- This of-course assumes your "thing" is software related.
- Academics in general, do read and write blog posts. They are more annoying to cite, but still reasonable.
- There are a few micro-fields of applied CS that publish exclusively through blog posts (The only one I know of is "Arbitrary Precision Document Representation")
- You're not a professional academic, therefore you have no "publish or perish" based KPI (Key Performance Indicator)
- further as a nonacademic writing publishing a paper gains you very little increase in employ-ability (even if it gets cited thousands of times). Some employers might care, for most its just going to be a neat thing you did once (not that different to how they might feel if you said you have climbed Mt Everest)
- You (as you admit) don't have the skills to write a paper, nor the connections to get someone to help. You do have the skill to write a blog post you demonstrated that in the asking the question.
- Not related works is expected in a blog post, it doesn't matter how trivial etc. The worst judgement someone is going to pass on you is ignoring it.
You can supplement this by writing a paper, and putting in on a pre-print repository like arXiv. As @Ilmari suggests in comments
- These tend to have low bar for entry, and are not peer-reviewed.
- It is almost certainly going to be around forever. (even if Corbell Univerisy vanishes, there are certainly going to be independent backups that can recreate the data)
- it is indexed by academic search engines like Google Scholar, so it will be found easily.
- Lots of industry academics (at lest in my field), tend to publish on arXiv, because they don't have the need to publish to keep their jobs.
- it is easy to cite, and is becoming quiet common to cite a work published only on arXiv.
You can then link to it in the blog post, saying "A more formal writeup is available on ..."