Blogging to become better at open source

[tmr08c]

I started writing this as a part of #80, but it felt like another topic from the original post.

It may be worth revisiting the idea and seeing if it makes sense on its own.

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In a recent [podcast episode](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m105-open-source-developers-inevitably-have-better/id1150826721?i=1000479280612) [Yegor Bugayenko](https://www.yegor256.com/about-me.html) posited that developers that do open source work have stronger technical and "soft" skills.

Yegor's idea is that in open source, almost everyone is working with people they don't know. This means their work is judged more on the work itself and doesn't include the benefits one would receive from their friends and co-workers. In addition to the judgment of the work, open-source developers need the ability to run the project and communicate with the world. This includes tasks like discussing ideas for new functionality, explaining to a contributor why their change will not be accepted, and triaging issues users create.

I believe that leveraging blogging can provide similar training to open source work.

Similar to open source work, your potential audience is the world (or at least people in the world that would benefit from your open source project or be interested in the topics you blog about). This wide audience comes with some challenges.

- You aren't going to get the benefit of writing to an audience that knows your voice and tone, and how that is reflected in your writing.
- You are also writing to an audience of varying skill levels. Learning to express your thoughts succinctly, clearly, and thoroughly can be difficult to balance across different topics. 
- Writing to the wider audience means you cannot lean on some of the help you may be able to with normal conversations with your team. If someone doesn't understand your post, you probably aren't going to be able to hop on a video call with them to work it out. Even if your blog supports comments, it's unlikely confused readers will start a fruitful conversation in the comment section to help flesh out your concepts.

However, learning to write for an unfamiliar audience should make writing for an audience that you know and knows you even easier. By working on developing your skills in a more difficult environment, you should find writing for your co-workers easier.

Writing for a blog does come with some advantages though. In my mind, the biggest of these is time. When writing for a personal blog, most people don't have any sort of actual publishing schedule to keep to. Having time to write, re-write, and edit can help you hone your skills. As your skills develop, you should be able to write in a more time-sensitive environment like work with the same level of quality you developed from blogging.