The lost art of writing
“Writing is the most underestimated skill in the software industry.”
A personal story from the early 2000's
It was summer of 2006, maybe even 2005, when I started working in a data consulting company. I had been working there for just a few months and I was trying my best to show that I was ready to handle on my own a data visualisation project for a huge media company.
Spoiler, I couldn’t 🙈, at least in the beginning.
The team had only two members: Marc and I; Marc, an awesome guy, was in charge of diving into the data, looking for interesting metrics and setting the formulas to calculate them, I was in charge of turning that into real.
UX, ETL transformations, backend services, frontend navigation, deployments, infra requirements, documentation,… everything in 3 months.
So there I was, sat in a bus on my 5h 30min weekend trip from Madrid to Oviedo to see my family and girlfriend (now my wife 😉) with my head on fire trying to come up with a plan for all the problems I can’t figure out.
I had been struggling for days at that point, trying my best to give some structure to the all the information I had, but it seemed like I just couldn’t make any sense of it.
Suddenly I had the simplest idea, I closed my laptop, took paper and pen and started writing all the different ingredients of the problem I had to solve.
The business goals, the expected user experience, the frequency of the calculus, the expected size of the problems, the dashboards, the widgets per dashboard, and then …after a couple of hours of just writing down the pieces something happened in my head.
All of a sudden there was no puzzle.
It was a clear system made of decoupled pieces, I didn’t have the implementation details yet but I couldn’t care less.
The whole problem was flushed out of my head into those pages and now that the structure is clear I knew the project was done even without a single line of code.
That was the first project I completed just by writing and I never stop doing that.
Why underestimated?
Ok, check the following questions and just think about them:
- Did you have a writing class while studying (college, bootcamp, …)?
- Have you ever enrolled in a writing course?
- Have you ever been requested to write something during a hiring process?
- Has your organisation ever trained you to develop writing skills ?
Now go through the same questions changing “writing“ for the most common suspects of our industry: the latest programming language, the latest agile practice, managing people, you name it, you got it.
The industry couldn’t care less about your ability to put your thoughts in order by writing them down and that’s a gigantic mistake.
Why matters?
Same exercise, let’s go through the following common activities on your daily routines:
- Capturing needs from customers.
- Refining needs from product.
- Explaining technical options and architecture decisions.
- Documenting acceptance criteria.
- Define contracts or tests (BDD).
- Consolidating and sharing technical knowledge.
- Improving onboarding experiences in a remote world.
- Working async.
- Or simply, finding the right words in slack.
Do you see it now? One more.
- Programming
In the end, programming might be the final boss of writing, just a different taste of the same exercise which sits on top of your technical skills, previous experiences, and mental processes.
Your writing skills help you get your code organised and turn weird commands and algorithms into a comprehensive story.
What about writing at JOOR?
Gutenberg would be proud of us, 😅.
Slowly, the last months, we have introduced some changes to benefit from all the goodness of writing:
- A better Confluence with a known structure to navigate information.
- Basic intro articles to explain the main domains of the platform.
- Written ARBs (architecture review boards) for reviewing meaningful architecture decisions.
- Structured async updates on slack to help work-life balance.
- …
What’s next?
It’s just a process, none of the previous stuff is perfect, but we have already tasted the goodness of getting better at writing and we have some ideas to go further.
What if we ask you to write a short tale on your next interview for a role at JOOR?
What if we ask our engineering team to complete a writing course this year rather than finishing another Kubernetes intro in Udemy?
What if we started sharing learnings, failures and experiences more often here? Yep, definitely we will do that 😉.
Looking for more?
- https://benmccormick.org/2019/03/01/190000.html
- https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/08/09/how-writing-can-advance-your-career-as-a-developer/
- https://blog.codinghorror.com/is-writing-more-important-than-programming/
- https://betterprogramming.pub/why-every-developer-needs-to-learn-to-write-better-d5974e38e64c
