A recent post about blogging myths by the inestimable Julia Evans* caught my eye.

A couple of the myths she points out - “you need to be original”, “you need to be an expert” - align super-strongly with “You should write more” (referenced _here some 6 months ago), and resonate with me just as much now as they did then. I _love that she calls out not necessarily needing to explain every concept in detail, as a sort of facet of knowing your audience; if I weren’t writing this for - broadly-speaking - “the LinkedIn eng community” I’d need to weave in way more details in some places and leave out way more details in others. I’ve actually had to go through this exercise when adapting material for conference talks and Eng Blog posts; it’s a hard thing when your total potential audience expands something on the order of 10^6-fold.

I also found myself nodding along at the (rather ironic) bit about how in some ways writing gets harder the more you do it. For me, this often comes in the form of “I’ve written hundreds of these things…did I already write about [topic] before?” I also sometimes ask myself the question “Would a new hire be able to grok what I just wrote?”…although I’ve found that way lies madness. I think I’ve settled in more on “Would someone who has been around for a year or so be able to grok what I just wrote?” If you’ve found the bathrooms by now (so to speak) then this blog is for you.