Writing has become more important than ever for developers: with COVID accelerating the shift to remote work, inevitably, some flows will become asynchronous in nature and writing things down is the best way to ensure everybody is on the same page. Besides, modern software engineering teams operate across many levels of communication where writing is critical:

• Issue descriptions in tickets;

• Onboarding documentation;

• Design documents and postmortems;

• Internal documentation;

Writing is no longer a side task: it's essential

In an async setting, if you can't write clearly, you can't express your ideas or make your point get across to your peers, and that introduces friction in collaborating.

When you jolt things down, you are, essentially, slowing down your brain and crystallizing your toughts. Slowing down allows you to express your ideas clearly and gives time for your peers to really digest what you've written and reflect on it. Everybody wins.

Making writing a priority

You can start today: next time you need to file a bug report, approach it as an opportunity to share knowledge through writing.
When you are conscious about your writing, and when you take the time to put yourself in the reader's shoes, the quality of your writing will increase, and, as a result, you will be engaged to keep doing more of it in different formats and situations.

Knowledge sharing in async settings

When you write, your knowledge stays preserved for the future and it can serve both your current colleagues as well as new people joining your team; when people follow the same documentation, they adopt the same mindset and strategies and that streamlines everything!