The Growing Dev turns one
One year ago, I embarked on a journey to improve my writing. I did it because I believe that writing is not only an essential skill for software developers but also a universal life skill.
To make sure I am making steady progress, I challenged myself to write one piece each week. I decided to write in public to guarantee the quality of my posts. My reasoning was simple: publishing something subpar because I didn't put the honest effort into it would feel very uncomfortable, and I wouldn't do it.
Choosing a newsletter as my medium was an easy decision. With 25 years of experience as a Software Engineer, I have plenty to share. Additionally, a newsletter was the ideal format for maintaining quality and consistency.
Today, I am thrilled to report that I successfully completed my challenge. I published my first post on 11/29/2023 - exactly a year ago, and I wrote a new post every week after that.
What I learned
My journey taught me a few important lessons about writing. Here they are:
Writing takes a lot of time
I knew that writing was time-consuming as I had written tens of posts on my personal blog before. The big difference was that before, I could spend weeks on a single post, but now I was on a schedule. I had about a week to write and publish a post. I found this surprisingly challenging. Initially, I could barely keep up with my plan despite spending most of my weekends writing.
Writing consistently is hard
Consistently doing anything that demands a significant amount of time is difficult. Writing is no different. It is so easy to justify giving up when a family or a job emergency happens (that tree that fell on our house was no fun, and the clean-up took weeks). It is so tempting to take a week or two off for a family vacation. But I knew that skipping once would only make it easier to skip again.
The English language
In the past year, thanks to intentional practice, I learned more about written English than I had since I moved to the United States in 2006. My two main resources were books (including "On Writing Well" by William Zinser and "The Elements of Style" by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White) and Grammarly. (Grammarly proved especially helpful in identifying mistakes I didn't realize I was making consistently.) I also used Chat GPT a bit. It was useful in some aspects, like finding synonyms and generating images, but I wouldn't say I liked the content it produced. It was either very pompous or too vulgar. And it just didn't sound close to how I write.
The results
Here are the results my practice yielded:
writing a post takes me now half the time it took when I started
newer posts read easier than the first ones I published
my writing at work became more concise and better tailored for the audience
I also have a library of posts to which I can point my mentees and team members.
What's next?
Even though I completed my writing challenge, it doesn't mean my writing couldn't improve further. However, going forward, I am going to make it less intense.
The weekly writing cadence left me little free time to do other things. I have a few topics I have wanted to research for a long time but couldn't put enough continuous effort into making solid progress. I also want to spend more time on some of the hobbies I neglected in the past 12 months. To make room for this, I decided to publish my newsletter less frequently. Furthermore, some upcoming posts might relate to my research topics instead of the Software Engineering career development advice I have been focusing on until now. I hope they will still interest you despite being different. Thank you in advance for your readership.
If you found this useful, please share it with a friend and consider subscribing if you haven’t already.
Thanks for reading!
-Pawel