My top piece of advice for software developers is counterintuitive. It has nothing to do with your technical skills.
Learning to write well is the best investment you'll make in your career growth.
Great written communication is so critical in our line of work. You need to be able to communicate complex technical topics to other engineers. You also need to be able to take those ideas and simplify them for audiences outside engineering.
To get better at writing, here’s my advice:
- Most importantly, practice. Write often. You don’t need to write a lot, but you should develop a habit of writing. Repetition is a key to developing writing skills and tricks you can reuse.
- Start a blog and get writing out in public. There’s no better feedback than comments and engagement directly from readers. I think every software developer should have a blog. Bonus: that blog sets you apart & adds credibility when applying for jobs.
- There are awesome resources out there on learning to write. Books, courses, etc might be helpful if you’ve never written before or are rusty. Books I can recommend: On Writing Well, Bird by Bird, and The War of Art.
- Use structure to help guide your writing. For instance, whenever I’m writing a new Jira ticket or design document, I generally follow the pattern of Summary, Background, Ask, Details. I don’t always follow the structure exactly, but it does help me break the writing into smaller pieces that help share context and expose the problem clearly.
As with everything in software development, the feedback loop is critical when learning to write well. You can only tell if you've communicated clearly by asking others who have read your writing what they understood. Get in the habit of collecting feedback about your writing & incorporating it into the next thing you write.
At a certain point in your career - around the senior developer title - your writing starts to become more important than the code you produce. It only grows in importance from there, so start writing & make it a goal to become a clear written communicator.