Pumping Iron

When I created this blog a couple of years ago, I’d been inspired by Soft Skills, a book of general life advice for software developers. It covered a range of topics, but one that particularly caught my attention was a recommendation to build an online presence through writing, primarily as a résumé building exercise.

That made a lot of sense, but I didn’t stick with it for long, perhaps because I wasn’t in the job market at the time. Nor am I now. So why the revival?

Part of that had to do with a conversation I had with our UX designer about domain names, which reminded me of how happy I’d been to snag this one. But the biggest reason was a side comment made in Joel Spolsky’s four-part series on writing effective software specifications:

Writing is a muscle. The more you write, the more you’ll be able to write. If you need to write specs and you can’t, start a journal, create a weblog, take a creative writing class, or just write a nice letter to every relative and college roommate you’ve blown off for the last 4 years. Anything that involves putting words down on paper will improve your spec writing skills.

The average software developer needs to write more than what you might expect, and those who do it well are rare. I want to be among them.