You Should Write Blogs

Steve made his case for blogging from inside the building: this went up on his internal Amazon blog in January 2005, roughly eight months after he started it, and it addresses coworkers the whole way through — official company blogging guidelines to follow, people from HR dropping by his office to say they read him (he wishes they hadn't), a closing appeal to whoever is sitting a few hallways over. It also practices what it preaches. Steve describes his method as three hours a week, one sitting per post or it doesn't ship, with Emacs doing most of the heavy lifting ("Emacs is to Eclipse as a light saber is to a blaster," an aside whose promised follow-up became Effective Emacs). The essay has exactly the shape that method produces: genial and prone to wandering, at one point into a dinner at the W hotel where engineers orbit James Gosling and Joel Spolsky, and a secondhand story about a secret conference where famous geeks compete to be crowned the dumbest person in the room.

The scenery has dated; blogs and wikis show up here as the only two models of self-publishing anyone had. The argument for writing even when it feels redundant does better. Every reader is on a different clock, ahead of you in some subjects and behind in others, and Steve's evidence is his own: Scheme took him nearly two decades and over a million lines of production code to appreciate, after years of perfectly good explanations that arrived before he was ready. Anyone whose design doc or RFC ever sank without a ripple will recognize the middle stretch of this one, and may find the timetable it proposes either comforting or appalling.