Writing is thinking
For the past few months, I’ve been gradually retreating from social media in an effort to reclaim my attention for working and living more deeply and intentionally.1 As I back away from the noisy chatter of Twitter and Instagram, I’ve decided to return to blogging. It’s something I’ve wanted to get back to for a while and on a personal website I control, one that doesn’t track or sell personal data.
This blog will be about me thinking, learning, and working in public. I’ll share some nitty gritty, practical things I’ve learned and am learning–mostly about developing software–and discuss projects I’m working on. But I’ll also write about other topics that interest me broadly related to technology, work, and culture. I hope that by writing here regularly, I’ll improve the clarity of my thinking, deepen my understanding of software engineering, and contribute in a small way to a larger conversation about the future we’re creating with all this software.2 Hopefully, others will find this interesting too.
Cal Newport’s writings on “deep work” and the “deep life” have had a big influence on me. For more on this, I recommend his books Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, as well as his blog, Study Hacks. ↩
I borrowed the title of this post from Kerry Ann Rockquemore’s “Writing IS Thinking”, an old blog post I used to have my students read when I worked in academia (a topic for a future post). It touches on some of these ideas about writing in order to think rather than to simply dispense information. I also take inspiration from Ta-Nehisi Coates who discusses writing as a “process of learning in public” in this interview in The Atlantic. ↩