itshalfempty

A reason to write

Writing has become a big part of my job over the last few years at Square. A lot of my work happens in a highly asynchronous way, with decisions, designs, and collaborative work generally taking place in written form. While writing in some sense has always been a part of my job as a software engineer, there is a big difference in fidelity required for documents aimed at different audience sizes.

Before Square, documents I produced would typically be more of an outline or highlights with the gaps filled in during a meeting or a call. I was generally working with a fairly small number of other people - usually a small engineering team and maybe a few non-engineering stakeholders. This approach keeps the documentation fairly lightweight and fluid, making it easy to make adjustments as details changed over time. However, as the project or organization size increases, relying on meetings and conversations to communicate requirements quickly becomes a bottleneck.

Writing is definitely a skill that can be honed. While I still find it taxing to write something that will be shared quite broadly, over time it has gotten easier. Giving myself a reason to write more frequently, and across a wider range of topics, will help me further develop this muscle.

I don’t like social media platforms

There are people that care about me, my perspectives, or my experiences. I would like to share more with people who are interested in following along. While it is easy to share on various social media platforms, I don’t really use any and I don’t want to. Building and maintaining a simple website is not much work - and it comes with several benefits.

1. My content is readily available without forcing readers to create an account or engage
2. There are no ads on my blog, nor will there ever be. There is no reason for me to try to earn money from my blog.
3. There is no user tracking, nor will there ever be. My blog is built to suit my needs and goals, and I do not need to monitor the usage of visitors to refine the experience. If you have suggestions or complaints, feel free to contact me.
4. My content is my content. I don’t have to worry about migrating platforms or exporting data, and a company will not make money off content I otherwise make freely available.
5. There are no social features.

Organizing my thoughts

I find that forcing myself to write about a topic can be a really helpful tool for clarifying or solidifying a point of view. Maybe this is a bit like rubber duck debugging, but thinking through how I might talk about a topic to another person can help me uncover assumptions or questions that I might not have been otherwise aware of. I’ve changed my opinion on several topics in the past because I started to write a description of a solution - only to find out that some key assumptions were wrong.

Often, just the effort involved to collect my (often non-linear) thoughts prompts me to dig pretty deeply into the topic. I enjoy that process a lot. Normally I end up discarding fragments of writing once I have sufficiently organized my thoughts - but a blog gives me a great place to record and share them instead.