Writing forces you to commit to specific words. The vague intuitions in your head can't survive the page; either they sharpen, or they fall apart. Either outcome is useful.
Most engineering posts I write start as a Slack message I never sent. The act of explaining something to someone, even an imagined someone, exposes the bits I thought I understood and didn't.
Why public, not just a private notebook
Private notes let you stay vague. You know what you meant — past-you and present-you share enough context that imprecise language still works. Public writing strips that crutch away. Either you say what you mean or someone in the comments will tell you what you actually said.
It also compounds in ways the resume never will. Posts I wrote two and three years ago still land in my inbox — sometimes from the people I most wanted to be reading them. A resume gets you in the room once; writing keeps the room finding you.
How to start without overthinking it
Pick the smallest real lesson from this week. Not 'how to think about distributed systems' — 'the one config knob that fixed our rebalance lag'. Three paragraphs. Hit publish. The bar for engineering writing is lower than you think; the bar for honest engineering writing is barely populated.
The first ten posts will feel rough. They will be rough. Ship them anyway. The compounding starts with post eleven, and it doesn't start at all without the first ten.
Most technical problems get easier when the assumptions are visible. Writing makes them visible — first to you, then to everyone else.