About 6 months ago I came across Jocko Willink on Twitter. He is an ex-Navy Seal with a straight forward approach to life and leadership. I do not remember exactly how I stumbled across him, but I immediately consume much of his Twitter feed. His no-nonsense approach to discipline resonated with me.

After 7 months of working on my personal discipline, my next step is to write more. As someone who typically works in code all day long, the obvious question is why write more instead of code more. There are two reasons:

  • Writing down thoughts is great way to take partial ideas and make them concrete. It forces the writer to work through the idea to a deeper level than otherwise happens with thinking alone. Jeff Bezos even forces this type of communication at Amazon.

  • Written communication is key to any profession no matter the persons current career level. Creating software is almost always a team activity. Creating great software requires effective communication both to the team and to the users.

To this end, I will start writing in this blog again. My goal is to share some thoughts weekly even though work makes that challenging. But, without a measurable goal it is not a goal. So, here we go.