Why I started writing again

For a long time the only writing I did was code and commit messages. It felt like enough. Code is precise, and precision felt like thinking.

Then I tried to explain a design decision to a colleague in a document, and I couldn’t. Not because the decision was wrong, but because I had never actually put it into words. It lived as a feeling of “this is right” and nothing else.

Writing is where the gaps show

When you write a sentence about why something should work a certain way, the sentence either holds or it doesn’t. There’s nowhere to hide a half-formed idea. Code lets you hide those — it compiles either way.

So I started keeping notes. Not for anyone. Just short paragraphs about problems I was working on. Most of them are bad. Some of them ended the problem on the spot, because writing the first sentence made it obvious what the answer was.

What changed

I think slower now, in a good way. I catch myself earlier when I’m about to build something I can’t explain. And I’ve started to enjoy the plainness of it — a paragraph doesn’t need a framework.

This site is mostly a place to keep doing that in public. Lower stakes than it sounds.