I’ve been meaning to create a new space to post things for a while. I have a lot of thoughts about how software is built and how teams work together. I find myself sharing these thoughts a lot with people in conversation, but I never seem to write them down.
Writing things down allows you to save yourself the trouble of repeating yourself. Some HTML on the internet is available to an interested party 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and is also less likely to shit the bed in articulating whatever wisp of experience or wisdom was on offer because it hasn’t had any coffee yet.
Writing things down also forces you to make sense because words have to be written. one. at. a. time. This means that your wild, wooly thoughts must be serialised. into. a. sequence. of. coherent. information that is useful to another human being. Thoughts are fragile, vague, and complex, and words often feel sort of blocky and obtuse by comparison, so this process is difficult. Inevitably, it leads to a first attempt that on review feels like:
Oh, wow, nobody could decipher or absorb anything useful out of this, and I have no idea what I’m talking about
While daunting, consider this feeling an act of ✨ empathy ✨ towards your audience. Thankfully, unlike a conversation, if you feel unclear you can just rewrite it. You will often find that it wasn’t that the words were too obtuse for your thoughts, it was that the thoughts were too vague for words.
Writing things down, by necessity, allows us to refine and clarify our own thoughts on the matter at hand.
What will I write down?
Some aspirations:
Professional learnings and experience – I’d like to do a better job of preserving the hard-won lessons, both technical and interpersonal, in case they’re useful to someone else, or even myself down the line. Having recently been through the experience again of interviewing for a new job, it would also be nice to have record somewhere of some scrap of profundity.
Less, but more often – I really admire this blog by a former colleague of mine, Braden Moore. Many of the posts are short and to the point, and that in no way diminishes them.
A portfolio – I’d like to have a space to catalogue and present some of the useless crap software I’ve built over the years because each project, even if unfinished, was part of my journey with software.
I don’t know yet – I’d like to build the habit, and see where it takes me.