Most technical writing happens after the fact. You solve the problem, then, if you ever get around to it, you write the tidy version, the one where you knew what you were doing all along. I try to work the other way. I write while I’m still inside the problem, before I’m sure how it ends.
It’s a habit older than any of my projects. I’ve been documenting in public since 2021, long before I had anything technical to show, back when writing was just how I made sense of things I couldn’t yet resolve. The conviction underneath never changed: that the process is worth showing, not just the result. That the messy middle is where the truth is, and the clean retrospective is a kind of polite lie.
Writing before the answer does two things to me.
First, it makes me honest. When I don’t yet know how a bug ends, I can’t pretend the path was obvious. I have to write down the actual confusion: the hypothesis that was wrong, the error that pointed the wrong way, the thing I assumed and shouldn’t have. That record is worth more, to me and to anyone reading, than the sanitized version where every step was inevitable. Nothing is inevitable while you’re in it.
Second, it makes me think better. Writing is the most ruthless debugger I have. The moment I try to explain a half-formed idea in plain words, the gaps show: the place where I was hand-waving, the assumption I never checked. More than once the act of writing “and then it should…” is exactly when I realize it won’t. The page catches what my head glosses over.
There’s a cost. Writing in the open before you have the answer means showing your uncertainty, and uncertainty is uncomfortable to publish. It’s much safer to wait until you look competent. But the safe version is also the lifeless one. The post nobody learns from is the one that skips the part where something was actually at stake.
I’d rather show the work while it’s still work. The result, when it comes, is just the last line. Everything that taught me anything happened in the lines before it, and those are the ones I want to write down, while they’re still true and still uncertain and still mine.
The answer is the easy part. The thinking is the thing. I write to do the thinking, not to report it.
