# Is it worth writing about? | notes.eatonphil.com

source: https://ift.tt/czKDOGy tags: #literature #writing uid: 202212112114 —

To practice writing

This is the easiest reason. While practice does not imply improvement, you cannot improve without practice.

Providing variety

When I learn a topic I normally go through dozens of posts, papers, docs, videos or books to find a version that clicks. If I can. I prefer to start with blog posts and often there are not blog posts on the subject. Books, docs, videos, and academic papers aren’t often as accessible.

Even if you’re writing about a popular topic, there’s still a chance your post gets through to someone in a way other posts do not.

To cement understanding

Finally, honest writing forces you to either understand the dark corners of what you’ve learned or to ask for help in these dark corners.

Topics

Some topics I think are always worth writing about and sharing:

1. Your process, failures and successes, to figuring something out
2. How to hack on some major open source project
3. In-depth comparison of projects or approaches, down to source code, benchmarks, and architecture when relevant
4. Building minimal versions of some production system
5. How some major systems works under the hood, down to the code
6. Mistakes you made in structuring organizations, or production architecture, or testing, etc.

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