I agree strongly with one aspect of what you are saying but offer a counter to it as well. Writing consistently is very important to being a good writer but knowing when to publish and only doing so when you have content worth publishing is the key.
It is important to keep yourself writing on a schedule but feeling compelled to publish everything you write or feeling like you always need to generate 'content' doesn't help anyone. As you say it causes the writer to focus on quantity over quality thus losing much of the personal value of writing and, for lack of a better word, pollutes you output with lower quality content thus losing the 'social' or 'branding' value of writing.
For someone intending to make writing into their profession, this is probably true, but for your average developer, it's probably more than enough to simply write whenever there is something worthwhile to write about.
Just an article or two is already a good bit of effort, and if it's about a topic that can't be googled in 5 minutes, there will probably be a good bit of writing, deleting and re-writing involved.
Combine that with other writing tasks that just come with the field, like writing documentation, and you'll already be doing a solid amount of writing practice, certainly more than many other professions.
Recovering interrupter with occasional relapses, lover of spreadsheets, blogger, programmer, adept debugger, conjurer of analogies, and probably other things.
I think to Art & Fear: The ceramics class and quantity before quality; in which the professor split the class: half would be graded on quantity of output, the other half graded by one single piece (e.g. quality). The end result, those who focused on quantity had the best quality.
Quantity. Hammer away at the thing you want to get good at. Not to the point of grooving an easy path or just mailing it in. You need to challenge yourself routinely with hard things, by stretching your skills. But the more you do, the better you’ll be.
If you are writing for "branding" or "social" value, write all the more. You can't know what will "catch". Put it out there as a song sung into the wind. You may find someone echoing and responding in song or verse.
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I agree strongly with one aspect of what you are saying but offer a counter to it as well. Writing consistently is very important to being a good writer but knowing when to publish and only doing so when you have content worth publishing is the key.
It is important to keep yourself writing on a schedule but feeling compelled to publish everything you write or feeling like you always need to generate 'content' doesn't help anyone. As you say it causes the writer to focus on quantity over quality thus losing much of the personal value of writing and, for lack of a better word, pollutes you output with lower quality content thus losing the 'social' or 'branding' value of writing.
For someone intending to make writing into their profession, this is probably true, but for your average developer, it's probably more than enough to simply write whenever there is something worthwhile to write about.
Just an article or two is already a good bit of effort, and if it's about a topic that can't be googled in 5 minutes, there will probably be a good bit of writing, deleting and re-writing involved.
Combine that with other writing tasks that just come with the field, like writing documentation, and you'll already be doing a solid amount of writing practice, certainly more than many other professions.
I think to Art & Fear: The ceramics class and quantity before quality; in which the professor split the class: half would be graded on quantity of output, the other half graded by one single piece (e.g. quality). The end result, those who focused on quantity had the best quality.
If you are writing for "branding" or "social" value, write all the more. You can't know what will "catch". Put it out there as a song sung into the wind. You may find someone echoing and responding in song or verse.