During my last vacation, I had finished reading the blog posts I had bookmarked on my phone, and needed new content: so I turned to all the blog newsletters I subscribe to and rarely read since they’re auto-archived in a special inbox.
I was reading through the 50 posts from sean goedecke I had received since I subscribed, one after the other. I read all of them on the flight back home. Once done, I was surprised, that was not what I was expecting from him! Don’t get me wrong, all the posts were fine, but only one or two made me think “Hot damn, that’s great!”.
And that surprised me because I shared a lot of Sean’s posts to friends and coworkers, a lot of his work really changed my perspective on my work and my career:
- Wicked features
- Knowing where your engineer salary comes from
- What makes strong engineers strong
- How to ship
- How to influence company politics as an engineer
- Finding the low-hanging fruit
- Good system design
- in these troubled times
I’m serious, these blog posts were transformative. Sometimes it was just the correct reformulation of something I already knew but didn’t know. Sometimes it was something completely new. But those are amazing blog posts.
So why in those 35 posts, only 2 or 3 felt great? Because the man can’t write only bangers! That’s just impossible! If all the other posts of his that I’ve read were so great, it was because they needed to be to reach me when I wasn’t subscribed to his content. Only the best of his posts were shared in another newsletter, on top of HN, or in my X feed.
Now that I have in my inbox every one of his posts, of course, not all of them will be as impactful. But this helped me realize how much he wrote! He’s a writing machine:
- 18 posts in July
- 11 posts in August
- 10 in September
In 3 months, Sean wrote twice as much as I did since the beginning of the year. And all of them are good, even if they’re not game changers for me, they might be for someone else. And by putting in the reps, he’s also improving the quality of all his future posts.
This reminded me of Aaron Francis post on how publishing your work increases your luck. Each new post Sean writes increases his luck in general, the chance that his work will deeply impact someone, the chance to be offered a job, and the chance to have an interesting conversation.
This is just another confirmation that I need to write more, much, much more! I wrote 20 posts this year (this is #21), maybe only one of them is good! This means I took only one chance with a good post published on the outside. Add to this that probably half my posts are board games or role-playing games related, and that reduces even more the luck created on the software engineer bubble (that still means I created some luck on the board games bubble, but that’s not the one I have my career in!).
If I posted every week, I’d be at two or three chances taken. If I posted twice or three times per week, I’d be at ten! And each post compounds, they get better, I write them faster, and it gives me more and more ideas for the next ones. I will have to think about how to put them in front of more eyes later on, but doing more of them will always help me.
If they’re bad, the only negative thing that will happen to me is that they won’t get read. Because it’ll never reach a lot of people, and those who are reached will just forget about it. I don’t remember the blog posts that didn’t speak to me. I only remember the ones that did!
I need to publish more.