Gergely Orosz: recommendation

Transcript context

…What was that post, by the way? It was called, "A comment is an invitation for refactoring. " I wrote my view that if there's a comment in a code, that means that comment should be deleted and you should just refactor the whole thing. And it exploded on Hacker News. Some people called me an idiot, some people called me absolute wisdom, and it was these two crowds battling it out. And I was like, wow, I actually made software engineers in Silicon Valley argue about my stuff. I saw some of the [inaudible 00:58:17] people, some really high [inaudible 00:58:18] people were really going for [inaudible 00:58:21]. So that's when I thought [inaudible 00:58:23] my writings, some people might read it, it's not guaranteed. And I started to write on that blog once every few months, depending on my mood, but I never stopped doing it. And I partially did it [inaudible 00:58:35] always hoped that it would get onto this site called Hacker News. But by the way, for a while, I didn't even know you could submit it, so I never submitted my own things. But the other thing was, I just kind of liked it, and I had this habit, and over years... I had this blog from 2015. For six years I was writing that blog, and in the last year... When I worked at Uber, on the side I wrote about my work, in terms of the things that I could write about, not about the details that we did, but some of the learnings [inaudible 00:59:02] for example, distributed systems. And more and more of these posts just started to just pop up on Hacker News. People would either submit it, or sometimes when I submitted it, it would just do well. And I was thinking, so people... I started to get this validation, people care about what I write. And to question of the success of the newsletter, by the time I launched a newsletter, I had a lot of posts that a lot of software engineers read, and there was a very famous post about performance management, how to do performance reviews. I wrote one about the tri-modal nature of software engineering salaries, where I observed that there's three different tiers that are... There's big tech and there's local companies. And I think what happened is, when I announced that I'm going to write this newsletter, I also put it on the blog. A lot of people realize that they... "I've been reading this Pragmatic Engineer, I don't know who is behind it, but I like it. Let me sign up. I do want to get an email every week, instead of the things that were every now and then." So there was years of work, and I wish I could tell you how to build a successful newsletter, but the best advice I have is still what Jeff Atwood does, except I have less conviction. But if you start writing, and you do it regularly, two things will happen. First of all, you're going to [inaudible 01:00:11] you write for yourself and you keep improving, you'll be a better writer. That's for sure. If you're lucky or if you're right about stuff, you might start to attract people who think similarly. So step one is get started. f and you keep improving, you'll be a better writer. That's for sure. If you're lucky or if you're right about stuff, you might start to attract people who think similarly. So step one is get started. Step two is keep it up. And my suggestion is [inaudible 01:00:26] for yourself. The weird thing is, until I started my newsletter, I never thought I would turn this ever into a business, but it always felt rewarding. So I never... If you're starting out writing a newsletter to do what I'm doing one day, it might work out. But interesting enough, I never even thought that this was an opportunity.…

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