Writing is thinking made visible. Not the polished, performative kind you see on social media — the slow, deliberate kind where you sit with an idea until you actually understand it.
I started writing technical posts for the same reason most people do: to remember things. A deployment trick, a debugging technique, a library comparison. The kind of notes you keep in a private doc and occasionally share with a colleague. But somewhere along the way, the act of writing became more important than the artifact.
The Compression Problem
When you write about something you’ve built, you’re forced to compress it. Not lossy compression — lossless. You have to find the essential structure of the thing and express it in a way that someone without your context can follow.
This is harder than building the thing in the first place.
Building software is an additive process. You start with nothing, and you pile on decisions until something works. Writing about software is subtractive. You start with everything — every false start, every debugging session, every refactored approach — and you have to figure out which parts actually matter.
Writing as Debugging
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve discovered a bug in my thinking by trying to explain it in prose. There’s something about the linearity of writing — the requirement that ideas come in sequence — that exposes circular reasoning. Code can hide cycles behind function calls and abstractions. A paragraph can’t.
If I can’t write a clear explanation of why a design decision was made, it usually means I don’t actually understand the tradeoffs. Going back to the code after that realization always makes it better.
The Audience of One
The secret nobody tells you about writing online: the primary audience is your future self. The person who will come back to this post in six months, having forgotten the context entirely, and need to reconstruct the reasoning.
Write for that person. Be specific. Include the things that seem obvious now but won’t be later. Show the wrong approaches, not just the right one. Your future self will thank you.
Everyone else who reads it is a bonus.