The Need to Write

I have started reading Jeff Atwood's Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code and I am finding it incredibly annoying.

In his book Jeff says that one of the reasons for creating stack overflow was to trick developers into communicating with each other. He says that if you do not use your writing skills enough, whether it be through a blog, stack overflow or another medium, you are not likely to be a very good communicator. Further to this he sets the challenge:

If you're not writing because you're intimidated by writing, well, you're likely to stay that way forever.

When I first read this I thought that it was a good point and ran home to write a blog post immediately. Unfortunately I couldn't think of anything to write. So I went onto StackOverflow to impart some knowledge onto my peers.

I do not get on with StackOverflow. As far as I can see it is a platform that allows lazy people to get their work done by those with too much time on their hands. It seems that 90% of the content is made up of two types of questions:

• The ones written by people who just don't know how to code and haven't bothered to learn. These can be answered by just about anyone for easy rep.
• The ones about weird and complex bugs or design decisions that other people have to go away and investigate. I have better things to do than investigate other peoples bugs.

On the other hand the remaining 10% is a gold mine of information for developers so I feel bad about knocking it. In any case being neither lazy nor frivolous with my time I could not muster more than a couple of answers. This started to get me worried. Maybe I am not a good communicator. If I cannot find something I enjoy to write about then I will be stuck like that... forever...

Luckily for me it is much easier to moan about things than to come up with a constructive article and my growing annoyance at Jeff for setting me a challenge I was not able to complete gave me the inspiration to write this post!