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Discussion on: Why Writing is Important for Software Developers

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Ryan Carniato

Great advice. I've found this to be my experience. Everything that has happened to me in the past 2 and a half years started from the decision to write. I had been working on a pet project, a JavaScript framework for years. It was performant, it was even topping most benchmarks, but I wasn't doing much with it.

Then one day I decided to write about the process of creating it. And then I wrote more about other frameworks that influenced it. Next thing I knew I was teaching core concepts, doing comparison articles, and opinion pieces on new technology trends. I'd worked in tech for 14 years but it was articles that I had written that attracted attention. I was offered a job working on an open source JS framework core team of a large silicon valley company. They found me from my articles.

Through promoting articles on Twitter I got to interface with many of the greatest thinkers in my industry. I started getting invites to go on live streams and podcasts, and now those have extended to conference talks. Today that framework I wrote hit 10k stars on github.

Now obviously I have put together something special. But it wouldn't have done anything if I hadn't started writing. I don't write every day but a bit a few times a week. Sometimes articles take weeks to come out but I've managed to keep a cadence of 2-3 articles a month. It's the best decision I made and I recommend it to anyone.