Comment by lloydde | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lloydde | Hacker News Reader

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The analogy doesn't work for me for a few reasons:

* That may be true for producing better code in a particular programming language or family of languages, but not designing better solutions. Designing software including prototyping and pseudocode independent of the constraints of a particularly development environment is invaluable. Too often I squish my problems to fit the tools I know best.

* Depending on the audience writing can be very different. This feels like a different spectrum of communication. I mentor teammates in improving all forms of written communication and this often starts with connecting with the audience of their email.

* Journaling (keeping a dairy) is being shown in recent studies to have all kinds of health benefits.

* Working out solutions free from the technicalities of the compiler and framework is a great technique, and one that I use often. Again, this is great for those who already know how to code, but if those technicalities still trip you up sometimes (as they do a beginning coder/writer), then you get a lot of value out of writing the code before declaring the problem solved (= publishing the blog post before declaring it written).

* For sure, and most people get a lot more practice with certain kinds of writing (email, technical documents, HN comments) than others. Blog posts generally have a certain audience in mind (you can specify at the beginning of the post which audience you're targeting, if you want), and it's a very different audience than most forms of writing. You should write blog posts if you want to get better at that.

* I don't contest the value of writing for an audience of one. It's just different from writing to an audience of a blog (even if that audience is mostly theoretical).

I should note that I disagree with the statement "every engineer should blog", as it has the usual failings of sweeping statements. However, if you wish to become a better writer, and in particular a better writer of content that can be widely understand by a relatively vaguely defined audience, then I highly recommend blogging.

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