Can You Become a 10x Developer by Writing a Tech Blog?
People believe that experts are built differently, that 10x developers, like Harry Potter, are born wizards. However, a study has shown that masters are made from a “life-long period of deliberate effort to improve their performance in a specific domain.” (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Romer, 1993).
Take driving as an analogy: you won’t achieve mastery by driving back and forth from work. You need practice and challenges on racetracks and dirt roads. So how can you expect to be a master programmer in your 9-to-5? You will need to step outside your comfort zone, and deliberately study and practice your field.
There are many ways to do so: race others in ranked online challenges, try to solve hard programming riddles, or study new paradigms. However, most programmers, whose work involves a form of writing, overlook writing itself.
The Power of Writing
Personally, I have found that writing forces me to dig into gut feelings, untangle them and express them in paragraphs that convey a message for others to read. I discover gaps I need to fill in my understanding, questions to ask myself, and material I should research.
As I force myself to connect loose ideas, the understanding of my domain becomes more holistic. I tend to think less about tools and more about paradigms and their reason for being.
Moreover, writing is a form of problem-solving. It forces me to break up challenges into manageable chunks. Unclear sentences (the ones that only I can understand) need to be expressed in a way that makes sense to another reader, and broken down into sense-making bits.
“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well.”
─ George Orwell
In addition to being deliberate practice, writing is a contribution to the community. In 2021, I wrote an article about my on-boarding experience in ReScript which overnight became the top Google search result (after its official website). It sparked interest in readers, and started engaging positive conversations, eventually becoming a talk.
It’s not selfish to say that this contribution builds your personal brand. In addition to improving your skills, becoming better in your field (“logos”), you will also improve your ethos. People will want to hear what you have to say, and rightfully so, as you will have done your homework on the topic.
