Why Every Developer Should Write — Even If Nobody Reads It
Writing clarifies thinking. A developer who writes about their work — blog posts, documentation, internal notes — understands their own code better, communicates more effectively, and builds a professional reputation as a side effect. This article argues for writing as a developer superpower.
Writing is thinking made visible. When you explain a concept in writing, you discover gaps in your understanding that were invisible while the concept lived as an unexamined intuition. "I understand microservices" becomes "Wait, can I actually explain when microservices are better than a monolith, and why?" The writing process forces that evaluation — and the gaps it reveals are the most valuable learning opportunities you'll encounter.
Writing as Debugging Your Understanding
The Feynman Technique — named after physicist Richard Feynman — works as follows: explain a concept in simple language as if teaching it to someone with no background. Where you struggle to explain simply, you don't truly understand. Teaching (and writing) exposes the difference between recognition ("I've heard of this") and understanding ("I can explain this from first principles").
Applied to development: when I wrote an article about Go's concurrency model, I discovered that my understanding of goroutine scheduling was superficial. I knew how to write goroutines. I couldn't explain why they're cheaper than OS threads, how the Go scheduler maps goroutines to threads, or what happens when a goroutine blocks on I/O. Writing the article forced me to fill those gaps — and the resulting knowledge improved my concurrent Go code measurably.
Writing as Career Leverage
A developer's career leverage comes from two sources: skill and visibility. Skill is necessary but insufficient — the most skilled developer in a room full of strangers has the same career opportunities as the least skilled until their skills are visible. Writing creates visibility for skill: a blog post about solving a production debugging problem demonstrates more competence than any resume bullet point.
The compounding effect: one quality blog post attracts readers, some of whom share it, attracting more readers. Over years, a catalog of 50-100 technical blog posts creates a searchable, permanent demonstration of expertise that works while you sleep. Recruiters find your writing. Conference organizers discover your expertise. Potential clients evaluate your competence. None of this requires active networking — the writing does the networking for you.
Writing as Team Communication
The developers who advance fastest aren't the best coders — they're the best communicators who also code well. Writing skills directly improve: pull request descriptions (clear PRs get reviewed faster and receive better feedback), design documents (well-written design docs get approved with fewer revision cycles), documentation (comprehensive docs reduce "how does this work?" questions that interrupt your flow), and async communication (clear Slack messages and emails reduce misunderstandings and back-and-forth).
"But Nobody Will Read It"
This objection misunderstands the value of writing. The primary beneficiary of technical writing is the writer, not the reader. Writing about your debugging process teaches you debugging patterns. Writing about your architecture decisions forces you to articulate and evaluate those decisions. Writing about a new technology deepens your understanding of it. The value is in the writing process, not the reading audience.
That said: someone will read it. The internet is large, and niche technical content has disproportionate discovery. A blog post about "solving CORS issues with Go Fiber behind Caddy reverse proxy" — a hyper-specific topic — gets found by every developer who encounters that exact problem. Your audience isn't millions; it's the hundreds of developers who face the same specific challenge and find your solution through Google.
Getting Started: The Low-Friction Approach
Start with what you already know. Don't research a topic to write about it. Write about something you solved yesterday: a bug you debugged, a decision you made, a tool you evaluated. You already have the expertise — you just need to externalize it.
Start short. A 500-word blog post takes 30-45 minutes to write. That's less time than a meeting that could have been an email. One short post per week is 52 posts per year — a substantial body of work from a trivial time investment.
Don't edit excessively. Technical blog posts aren't literary productions. Clear, correct, and helpful beats polished, perfect, and unpublished. Ship the draft. Fix typos if someone points them out. Move on to the next post.
Writing is the most underutilized superpower in software development. It costs nothing, requires no tools beyond a text editor, compounds over time, and improves every other professional skill you have. The only barrier is starting. So start.