Writing
Writing is the activity of composing text to communicate ideas, information, experiences, or arguments.
Writing for Developers: Blogs that get read
The practice of composing text to communicate ideas, information, or experiences in a way that sustains reader interest.
- How it is used
- Deploys writing to explain engineering experience, teach peers, build reader trust, and develop expertise through articles or books.
- How deep it goes
- Explains preparation, drafting, blocker removal, revision, and longer-form practice, while deferring detailed sentence-level techniques to optimization.
- Examples
- Uses rubber-duck dictation, colleague conversations, bug hunts, lessons-learned diagrams, and a Zig database-migration post.
- What you can do after
- Practice/perform writing by preparing, drafting rapidly, gathering early feedback, revising for readers, and sustaining progress on longer projects.
Read how Writing for Developers: Blogs that get read explains writing →
The Creative Programmer
Writing is the activity of composing text to communicate ideas, information, or arguments.
- How it is used
- Supports programmers in communicating technical decisions and turning collected notes into documents, proposals, documentation, and other artifacts.
- How deep it goes
- Provides practical habits for note-based drafting, interruption recovery, focused work, iteration, and seeking expertise rather than formal writing theory.
- Examples
- Uses daily notes, rough sketches, unfinished next-day sentences, sticky-note failures, and domain-expert conversations as concrete practices.
- What you can do after
- Practice/perform it by capturing ideas, assembling linked notes into drafts, and leaving contextual breadcrumbs before interruptions.
Related concepts
- interruptaddresses · An interrupt is an event or signal that breaks ongoing activity and redirects execution or attention so a condition can be handled.
- toneconfigures · Tone is the emotional or attitudinal quality conveyed by communication, including the interpersonal manner in which it addresses its audience or subject.
- memorycontrasts with · Memory is a storage resource or mechanism that retains data or computational state for access during computation or later use.
- paramedic methoduses · The Paramedic Method is a structured prose-revision technique that identifies and replaces constructions that obscure a sentence’s actor and action.
These guides are generated from the text of Manning books by Manning's knowledge graph and link to the sections they draw on. The full books are available on liveBook and at manning.com.