Why I Write Weekly Notes

I have kept a weekly (or bi-weekly) Confluence blog at Stripe for the better part of 4 years now. Every once and a while people ask why I do that. Here's what I tell them.

• It helps in performance review season: It's hard to remember everything you did when performance review season rolls around. Having a weekly blog of your work helps you easily catch up on documents I wrote, decisions I drove, and overall successes.
• It allows me to shout people out: I want to make sure people know that I saw the fact that they did good work and I really appreciate it. Tagging people in a weekly blog post via Confluence is a great low-key way to say "I saw you and enjoyed what you did". It also helps me elevate neat things that I think are valuable to lots of people. I try to be especially mindful of doing this with more junior engineers or underrepresented folks.
• It helps create ambient awareness of my work: My interests tend to be pretty broad. Broadcasting notes creates awareness of where I'm focusing so that others can find me and potentially either help me out or we can work together to connect our work into a coherent whole. In other words, it helps increase my luck surface area
• It helps me organize my thoughts: Writing is thinking. Good ideas don't emerge from my brain on the first try. That's not how my brain works. I need to process a lot of thoughts out loud or at my keyboard in order to get all the messiness straight in my own brain. By keeping a weekly blog it gives me a place to dump down those initial thoughts and sketch out rough drafts to refine them. This helps me get to a clearer final story. I also like to think it helps others see that staff engineers aren't some impossibly brilliant people who come up with things out of thin air. We're humans who bumble through problems to get to the right place, just like everyone else.

So far those work for me. The habit is valuable enough for me to keep it up for a few years. Maybe it will be useful for you too.

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