Ryan Peterman

I think one of the last topics that I wanted to ask you about was writing.

You have a ton of awesome posts on your blog.

The style of writing is incredibly clear.

And I was curious, why do you write so much as an engineer?

Definitely.

Yeah, I remember being surprised early in my career.

I had a manager or tech lead who we would write these docs on either designs or the strategy.

And he said, even if you just wrote it and you threw it away, it would still be worthwhile because you'll realize things as you're writing and that clarity will save you a lot of time down the road.

And it's interesting to me because a lot of engineers

they complain about writing docs.

Docs and all the stuff around the code, they kind of hate that.

It's a sign of slow, big company processes.

And what would you say to an engineer like that who's saying, just let me write the code?

You had a really interesting blog post.

This was from a while back.

It's titled The Four Hobbies and Apparent Expertise.

And you introduced this really interesting idea.

It's a two by two matrix.

And on one side, there's doing versus discussing.

And on the other side, there's the hobby and the gear.