In the Beginning…

A short time ago1 in a galaxy not so far away2 I maintained a company-internal blog at a former employer. I posted once a week without fail for over 8 years - 420-some-odd posts. It’s something I’m still proud of. The name of the blog was inGraph of the Week.

igotw started with a directory full of screenshots I’d taken of interesting graphs/telemetry of the systems I was supporting. Before I ever wrote a single post I had hundreds of these images, and I was fond of busting open my stash and telling their stories to anyone within earshot.

“See this spike in traffic? This is when Conan mentioned our site that one time.”

“Look at these instance error rates. See how the canary broke, got promoted, got rolled back…and then the same exact thing happened the very next week?”

“Check out this plateau in p95 latency - what do you think the timeout configuration looks like?”

…and so on. My manager at the time saw this and encouraged me to publish these stories more broadly so that more people could get value out of them…and so, igotw was born. I’d like to capture a few things I learned along the way for posterity.

Writing Is Hard

For me, writing isn’t something that comes naturally. I’m still bad at it. I tend to try to make my writing sound like my speech, which means an awful lot of over-use of punctuational quirks3 4. I have a hard time getting into a “flow” state, and a really hard time not going back over the first few sentences/paragraphs obsessively before finishing a draft. In short: I’m pretty sure I Do It Wrong™. I don’t actually have a solution for this, other than to say…

Writing Consistently5 Is Hard

Gym rats grok this. If you wanna pump your quadriflexiceps, you gotta have a routine. You have to put in the work, you have to do it regularly, and - for me, at least - you have to never not do it. When I started writing igotw, the deal I made with myself was “Every Thursday”. And yes, that meant shipping a post on Thanksgiving Day…but that’s what I needed in order to make the thing keep going. Skipping a week because I “wasn’t feeling it” would’ve been a backslide into oblivion. I will note that once I’d been doing it for a few years I established enough trust in myself to relax this constraint to “any day of the week, so long as you Ship It by Sunday”. But at the outset? It was Thursday. Period.

Writing Is Worth It

I’ve mentored a fair number of folks along the course of my career and given more informal advice to a many more. I’d say “Write!” is probably in the top 5 nuggets I’d bestow upon just about anyone6. A (brief) FAQ of the follow-up questions I’ve gotten on this:

  • What should I write? Literally, anything7. What you’re writing about doesn’t matter nearly so much as the act itself.
  • Why should I write? A manager I had in a previous life once told me “Any investment you make in yourself is a good investment.” This was sage advice then and has held up well over time. This isn’t just ars gratia artis we’re talking about here. Being able to write - to put thoughts to “paper” - to communicate - is a super-valuable skill, and honing a skill takes practice. So…practice it.
  • What if no one reads it? My first instinct to this question is to respond “Who cares?”, but I’ll confess to a certain amount of pride/vanity when it comes to popular response - that dopamine hit of someone appreciating something that I’ve produced. This might be a bit Field of Dreams, but if you keep at it long enough and find a way to distribute your writing that works for the people you want to reach then someone is bound to notice.
  • What if everyone reads it? There are an awful lot of people in the world. On a scale from Zero to Everyone you’re entirely more statistically likely to end up on the obscurity end of the spectrum. That said, another bit of advice I got somewhere along the way was “Assume anything you write might end up being published on the front page of the New York Times.”
  • What if people don’t like it? I, too, am a human being and have my own hangups about rejection. Also, a great quote I heard once went something like: “I don’t know what book I wrote until I find out what book people read.”8 I guess the best I can say is this: You Do You. Don’t shy away from authenticity. This is actually a place where statistics is in your favor. Again, there are an awful lot of people in the world, and the odds that someone out there cares about what you have to say are high. Find your tribe.

  1. We’re talking months, at time of writing. ↩︎

  2. In fact, our very own galaxy. ↩︎

  3. …and entirely too much profanity. ↩︎

  4. …and entirely too many footnotes. ↩︎

  5. …or really doing anything consistently… ↩︎

  6. Right up there with “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.” ↩︎

  7. Unless you’ve got a recipe blog…in which case, just post the fucking recipe. Put it at the top and/or have one of those lovely “Jump to Recipe” buttons. I’m sure the time you summered in Tuscany was the absolute tiznits, but I’ve got mouths to feed and I’m just trying to remember which spice I’m missing in this sauce. ↩︎

  8. [citation needed] (I can’t rightly recall who this is attributed to.) ↩︎