Why Programmers Should Write, and not just Code

Tree branches. Illustration from Seitei Kacho Gafu (1890–1891) by Wantanabe Seitei, a prominent Kacho-ga artist. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

One of the most underrated skills worth training as a developer is traditionally not thought of as a development skill, but many don’t consider it a soft skill.

A while back before my development career gathered any steam, I spent a lot of my time writing. Very rarely about computers and programming itself, mostly free writing and putting my thoughts on paper — occasionally what I wrote was good enough by my standards at the time to publish.

I went on stints where I would write, edit, and eventually publish my stories sometimes twice a day. That eventually got to the point where the money I made writing gathered enough steam to have an impact on my wallet, and the cycle was good enough to continue doing it.

But then life happened and I had to focus on other things. But in all those other things, having spent some months taking writing seriously has paid off tremendously.

Areas of impact

I’m now settled into a career where my priority is writing code and building software, but writing is paying dividends in that too. If I break down how my time is spent during a typical week, I would say that I spend 60% of my time writing/working directly on the codebase, 15% of my time in meetings, 10% of my time learning and reading articles and the last 15% writing…