Writing Is An Undervalued Engineering Skill

Dear new developer,

This post discusses writing and how learning to write well can really level up your engineering experience. You can also view over 300 comments about this post on one of my favorite online communities, Hacker News.

The author has some suggestions on how to become better:

So how can you work on becoming better at writing? Writing clearly, concisely and in a way that is easy to read? As with every skill, it’s a matter of being aware of the fundamentals, practicing, getting feedback and repeating.

I haven’t read the books he suggests for the “fundamentals” (yet), but I agree that practicing, getting feedback and repeating are crucial. It’s why I think that a blog is such a great way to spend your time.

But I think it points to the larger issue, which is that writing well is a scalable way to communicate, and that communication is at important as writing code. If you writing the wrong code, you might as well not have written anything at all.

Worth reading the whole post: Undervalued Software Engineering Skills: Writing Well.

Sincerely,

Dan