Writing is thinking

Someone asked me why I bother with the blog. Nobody reads it, they said — not meanly, just stating the obvious.

They’re right. Almost nobody reads it. And it genuinely doesn’t matter, because readers were never the point. I write because I don’t actually know what I think until I try to put it in sentences.

That sounds backwards. You’d assume the thought comes first and the writing just records it. But every time I sit down to explain something I was sure I understood, the holes show up. The step I’d skipped. The assumption I’d never looked at. Two things I apparently believed at once that don’t fit together. The opinion that felt solid in my head turns out to be fog with confidence.

I once wrote that Laravel Observers boost performance. They don’t, really — they decouple your code, which is a different thing. I’d confused “cleaner” with “faster,” and it took rereading my own confident sentences to notice.

Writing doesn’t transcribe the thinking. It is the thinking. The version in your head was a draft your brain rubber stamped because nobody was checking.

Which is a thing every developer already knows, just under a different name. You start explaining a bug to a colleague — or to a rubber duck on your desk, if you’ve gone fully feral — and you solve it halfway through the sentence, before they’ve said anything. Saying it out loud forced you to walk through the problem instead of around it. A blog is the same trick, except it keeps the receipts.

And the receipts pile up in useful ways. Write one post explaining something, and next time someone asks, you send a link instead of sitting through the meeting again. Write enough of them and you’ve got a public record of how you actually think — which, it turns out, is a far better CV than the bullet points. Nobody believes a resume. People believe a trail of you reasoning in the open over a couple of years.

There’s a luck angle too, though I almost don’t want to mention it because it’s the part everyone fixates on. Yes — a post can bring the stranger’s job offer, the expert who corrects you and teaches you more than a course would, the person on the other side of the world stuck on your exact problem. But all of that is a side effect. Lottery tickets you only hold because you wrote the thing.

The actual payoff shows up on day one, with zero readers. It’s the moment you’re stuck on a paragraph and realize the paragraph is hard because the thought underneath it isn’t finished yet. You wrestle it until it is. That’s it. That’s the whole return, and it arrives whether anyone reads you or not.

So I don’t think the bar for starting a blog is “do I have an audience,” or even “do I have something original to say.” It’s just: do you want to think more clearly than you do right now?

If yes, write the post. Publish it into the void. The void’s fine — you weren’t writing for it anyway.