How to overcome your fear of writing by writing like you code

How often do you get the fear? What do I mean by fear? How about the knot I got in my stomach just before I plunged out of plane on a parachute jump? It’s more than the brain logically planning to avoid danger, your whole body feels it, a foreboding about what’s coming next.

Working in IT means sudden severe physical dangers are unlikely. But aversion to fear continues to exist when we get asked to do certain tasks.

In my first job, it was when my boss asked me “Have you completed the documentation?”

In my 2nd job it was “Did you send that email to the customer yet?”

And later “How’s that presentation going?”

What was the problem? All those tasks involved writing. It couldn’t get much worse than that. Very few developers like writing (unless it’s in Slack). The bigger the audience and the more important it is, the more fear the writing task brings.

Back to coding. When was the last time your code worked the first time? The time you wrote a couple of hundred lines of code that were error free and to perfection, so that it compiled and ran exactly as expected the first time?

We as developers would never expect first time code perfection, and coding is our main task. Yet when asked to write…