Leverage writing

Writing is a powerful tool that can greatly benefit software engineers in many ways. It helps you to develop and organize ideas, improve grammar and vocabulary skills, and level up in your professional career.

People knew my work through writing. Back in 2018, the goal was just for me to share something out there. However, I quickly realized that writing was not only a way for me to share my knowledge and insights, but also a valuable tool for my own professional career.

Since then, I became a paid guest author for tech publications, won a few technical writing contests, and was also invited to speak at conferences and events.

Helps me organize my thoughts

I found my interest in writing by accident while composing my thoughts before coming into the next design meeting I knew nothing about. I tried to wrap my head around the topic prior to the call, sufficient enough that I could ask meaningful questions or make a contribution. Since then, writing has become an integral part of me as a software engineer.

When it comes to organizing thoughts, I found Richard Feynman's technique comes in handy, especially when I try to learn new things and write about something. I admire Richard Feynman's teaching and the way he simplifies complex ideas. His technique is helpful whenever I encounter writer's block or am in need of a structure to compose my thoughts.

Applying Richard Feynman's technique in writing is to:

1. Select a concept to learn - write something you're passionate about or you don't know yet but want to write about
2. Teach it to yourself or to someone else - try to write what you know about the topic
3. Return to the source material if you get stuck - identify what you don't know, read more about it, and write what you know about now
4. Simplify your ideas - write and explain simply for your readers

Helps me scale my thoughts

If you will work on a new and complex feature that needs feedback before implementation, you can write a good design doc. This will help you align your team towards a common goal and resolve disagreements prior to development. You can use Notion and Google Docs to write and gather feedback.

Here are the 3 sections I find important to be in a design doc:

1. The Problem - aim to describe the problem within the first few words or sentences
2. The Solution/s - provide the solution that can help your team move forward, and outline some alternatives based on your research
3. Action Items - this section should answer the questions of what's next and the estimated time of delivery

I published a couple of internal team wiki pages and design docs that helped my teams onboard new engineers faster and gather feedback asynchronously.

Set up your team's wiki pages if you think your team lacks documentation around processes, projects, and tooling or if you think you always need to present trivial details during onboarding or technical calls.

Conclusion

Writing creates opportunities for you. David Perell argues that writing online is the fastest way to accelerate your career. You can check out his article The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online.

When you write, you create a public record of your thought process, your experience, and your expertise. This can help you build your reputation, network with other professionals in your field, and sometimes lead to new job opportunities.

It's important that you start writing. A simple blog on medium.com or dev.to should be enough to get started.