I created three design docs for the same open-source web app: • I spent 16 hours writing one of the design docs completely by hand. • I generated one using Claude Opus 4.6 (medium effort). • I gene...
I’ve worked as a developer for 20 years, and I’ve always cared about clear writing. When I join a new dev team, the first thing I do is ask to update their onboarding docs. I capture what I learn in w...
With 2025 wrapped up, I can finally answer a question I’m curious about every year: who were the most popular bloggers of Hacker News? Who counts as a blogger? I explain more in my methodology page,...
One of my favorite programming books is Crafting Interpreters by Bob Nystrom. It teaches you how to build a programming language from scratch. Along the way, you learn about text parsing, data structu...
You’ve spent weeks carefully writing a design document for your software project, but what happens next? How can you get useful feedback about it from your teammates? How do you prevent your design re...
I started reading software blogs before I got my first programming job 20 years ago. At this point, I’ve read thousands of blog posts and essays about software, but only a small handful stuck in my mi...
Adam Gordon Bell is a developer, blogger, and the host of the software engineering podcast, CoRecursive. I interviewed Adam about writing and his success at attracting customers through his blog posts...
For the past eight months, I’ve been working on my book, Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers. I’m publishing the book incrementally as I write, which means readers give me f...
For software developers, there’s tremendous value in writing effective emails. Good emails save time, reduce misunderstandings, and earn you recognition within your company.
A release announcement showcases how the user’s experience is better today than it was yesterday. That sounds obvious, but most release announcements seem to forget that there’s a user at all. So man...
What counts as a personal blog? • I count a site as a personal blog if: • the site contains written content (not just an app or a video) • the site is authored by a single person • A blog still co...
Your high school English teachers probably warned you that passive voice is dangerous and forbidden. Then, when you were an adult, some guy in a leather jacket told you that passive voice is cool and ...