I think I write well. Other people tell me I write well too, and it’s nice when someone comes to me at work and asks me to check over something they’re writing. It could be a message to a customer, an update we want to post to our status page, or a technical scoping document for something we’re about to build.

I find speaking a bit harder: sometimes I’ll be half-way through a sentence when I realise that there’s a better way to make the point I’m making, and I’ll pivot and start again.

We’ve been building a shiny new editor for post-mortem documents at incident.io recently, and so I’ve been thinking a lot about writing. For me, writing feels like the easiest way to organise my thoughts, or to work out what opinion I have on something. In an incident yesterday, writing up a summary of what I’d been investigating felt like the easiest way of working out what the next step should be.

Lots of my writing is private because it’s work-related, so I’m starting a blog here to see if I can form more of a public writing habit.