Writing & Blogging

Blogging & Why Write#

• Blog about things you don’t understand yet: Writing is the best way to think clearly about a topic—condensing thoughts into words reveals how much you actually understand.
• Farnam Street: Why Write?: On how writing forces clarity of thought.
• How I Hired a Freelance Editor for My Blog: Michael Lynch on working with an editor to level up technical blog posts.
• Jacob Tomlinson: Writing blog posts while walking the dog: Using voice notes on dog walks to draft authentic blog posts in the age of low-effort AI content.
• Joel Hooks: 🖋 Stop Giving af and Start Writing More: Why blogs don’t need to be treated as polished “content marketing strategies” or personal branding exercises.
• Paul Graham: Write Like You Talk: The classic essay on keeping writing informal, natural, and conversational.
• Refactoring English: Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging: Common mistakes beginner software bloggers make and how to avoid them.
• Refactoring English: The Software Essays that Shaped Me: A curated collection of influential software essays.
• rmoff’s random ramblings: Blog Writing for Developers: Practical encouragement and workflow tips for developer blogs.
• Simon Willison: I built a new feature for my blog using my voice: Shipping blog features by talking to a laptop while cooking dinner.
• Simon Willison’s TILs: Building an automatically updating live blog in Django: How Simon Willison built his Django live-blogging setup.
• Technical Blogging Lessons Learned - Write that blog!: Takeaways from years of technical blogging.
• Vasili Shynkarenka: 8 questions for writing: Eight guiding questions before and after drafting a piece.

Engineering Writing & Documentation#

• A Life Engineered: On the Death of Amazon’s Writing Culture: What happens to the six-page memo culture when AI makes generating six pages trivial without doing the thinking.
• A Life Engineered: You Are What You Read: Why the effort behind a written document used to be its signal—and how free AI text changes that.
• Doist: How to Write For the Way Your Coworkers Actually Read: Structuring async workplace writing so teammates can scan and act on it.
• Examples are the best documentation: Why concrete examples beat abstract explanations in technical docs.
• Heinrich Hartmann: Writing for Engineers: A practical guide to clear technical writing for software engineers.
• Julia Evans: Get your work recognized: write a brag document: Keeping a running log of your engineering accomplishments.
• Marijke Luttekes: Technical documentation writing quick tips: Actionable tips for cleaner technical documentation.
• Refactoring English: How to Write an Effective Software Design Document: Using design docs to think through decisions and align teams before writing code.
• Refactoring English: Rules for Writing Software Tutorials: Principles for writing tutorials that actually teach.

Note-Taking & Thinking in Text#

• Build the Perfect Productivity System with Paper Notebooks and Digital Tools: Combining paper notebooks with digital note systems.
• Forte Labs: Progressive Summarization: A Practical Technique for Designing Discoverable Notes: Designing notes so your future self can scan and rediscover them quickly.
• How to take meeting notes: Simple habits for useful meeting notes.
• Jacob Tomlinson: Why taking notes still matters: Why writing your own notes beats relying on AI note-takers that write the “textbook” for you.
• Ron Forbes: Building Your AI Second Brain: A Practical Guide for the Overwhelmed Knowledge Worker: Organizing personal knowledge workflows with AI.
• Simpler Machines: Taking notes on a new codebase: Using written notes to map out an unfamiliar codebase.
• Simpler Machines: Why you need a “WTF Notebook”: Writing down every friction point when onboarding to a new project or team.
• Zettelkasten Method: The Scam Called “You Don’t Have to Remember Anything”: Why externalizing notes shouldn’t replace actual thinking and memory.

Communication & Anti-Slop#

• A few words on communication: Reflections on engineering communication.
• A Life Engineered: 5 Simple Ways to Level Up Your Communication: Practical habits for clearer engineering communication.
• A Life Engineered: The Reason Most People Are Terrible Communicators (And How to Fix It): Why engineers struggle to communicate clearly and how to fix it.
• High Growth Engineer: Communicate like a Senior: Add the (right) context: Giving teammates and stakeholders the right level of context.
• High Growth Engineer: The 5 levels of communicating impact as an engineer: Framing engineering work around outcomes.
• High Growth Engineer: Top 5 Communication Frameworks for Engineers You Must Remember: Reusable templates for structured communication.
• How to protect yourself from workslop: Dealing with low-effort AI-generated workplace documents.
• nohello.net: Please don’t say just “hello” in chat.
• noslopgrenade.com: Don’t throw unedited LLM walls of text at people.
• ohhfishal: Claude Says….: Why pasting raw AI feedback into human discussions misses the point.

Tools & Platforms#

• Google NotebookLM: AI-powered research and note-taking assistant.
• Half Quill: Collaborative writing platform built around picking up a story where a stranger left off.
• lfnovo/open-notebook: Open-source, privacy-focused alternative to NotebookLM.

Videos#

• AI Slop Is Destroying The Internet: How low-effort generated content is flooding the web.
• Claude just killed the note-taking app. Here is proof.: Using Claude Code directly on local markdown notes.
• The Holy Grail of Neovim Note Taking: Workflow for taking and organizing notes inside Neovim.