From Code Reviews to Blog Posts: Overcoming the Writer's Block

For a very long time, I couldn’t write any blog post. I had this mental block telling me “what would you write about that would be worth the time and effort?” or “smarter people have already written about it so why add more noise?”. However, I recently realized that I was already writing what could be blog posts.

Practice, Get Feedback, Practice Again

The feedback loop is key to lean organizations. It’s the main element for continuous improvement. It’s basically the same as when you’re learning a new language or music instrument. You try, you make a mistake, the teacher (or colleague, or app, or whatever) tells you it’s wrong, you try again.

As software developers, we sometimes have to look for the solution of our mistakes, errors and problems by ourselves. Before the rise of ChatGPT, the default pratice was to type on Google our problem we faced and we were saved by Stack Overflow, official documentations or blog articles. Thing is, we started our research knowing there was something we didn’t know.

Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns

But what if we are unaware of our mistakes? What if I’ve been learning a guitar song but all the strings are untuned? I may have created a new genre of music but most likely, I’m just playing the wrong chords.

Sometimes, the code happens to work. The compiler doesn’t complain, the server runs the code without throwing any errors. Does it mean it’s safe from any mistakes or improvements? Obviously not. It’s like playing the right chords on an untuned guitar. Beginners might not even notice it. That’s why code reviews have been part of the code delivery process in every company I’ve worked for. The best thing about it is that you get feedback on parts of your code you didn’t even know could be improved.

Create Pull Request, Get Code Review, Update Pull Request

The pull requests / code reviews combo is a very powerful feedback loop especially when mentoring less experienced developers. Not long after I joined Kactus, the company merged with its main competitor. One of the main challenge was to train the developers from the other company from a Php tech stack to a Ruby-on-Rails one. Once they became autonomous enough with Ruby, they started creating their first pull requests. My reviews covered sometimes technical details but sometimes, it was more about Rails conventions from the Rails doctrine and sometimes about software patterns and principles. By nature, code reviews feedback are tailored to the developer knowledge.

The Blog Articles Mine

One developer told me he saved some of the code reviews I wrote. That’s when it occurred to me that writing a code review actually can be a technical article on a specific topic that gives insights to someone else. It kind of gives an answer to my mental block: at least someone is interested by this article but most importantly, by digging into the reviews I made, I managed to extract raw blog material. The content would need to be polished and sometimes expanded but at least, I’m not anymore out of topics to write about!