Category Archives: Writing

Evening Pages

I have been doing Morning Pages on and off for a few years. If you are new to them, it’s the practice of writing handwritten, non-stop, stream of consciousness, non-edited text for three pages. It takes about 20-30 minutes once you get going. The benefit to me is that it proves that I can force myself to write. It trained me to push past whatever it was that held be back from writing more.

I started doing them again as an exercise in The First 13 Weeks of 2026. It’s part of how I am Making Happiness a Priority. It’s a small boost to the day when I’m finished.

But, for a couple of days this week, I didn’t find time in the morning and decided to do them at night instead—close to bedtime. In these sessions, I treated it more like a shutdown than a boot up.

In the morning, I search for ideas to write about later in the day. At night, though, I have been unloading my thoughts. The things that might occupy my mind as I try to drift to sleep get their final say.

Interleaved Reading

After graduating college, my book choices have been self-determined, and for a long time, I read them serially. This is weird because up until then I was always reading more than one book at time (by necessity).

But, a few years ago, while researching learning methods and incorporating spaced-repetition (i.e. flash cards) into my life, I saw a recommendation to interleave reading. The idea is simple: You read more than one book at a time. This might be obvious to some, but it wasn’t to me. It was liberating.

One problem of reading a book all the way through is that you don’t have time to consider a chapter before moving on. When you interleave books, you have time to ruminate on them in the background. Better than that, you can use spaced-repetition to build flash cards that you practice before moving on. Then, while you are reading, the older chapters are periodically shown to you, reinforcing the whole book as you read.

Another exercise is to write your own synthesis of the chapter, applying it to your personal interests. This kind of note can be a blog post or a page in your Digital Zettelkasten. Over time, these original thoughts might build up to something bigger. For me, it was my book.

Finally, I read a lot of books that are meant to be used, not just read. They offer their own exercises. For example, here’s a post about the way I use The Artist’s Way, a quintessentially useful book, which encourages you to read a chapter a week and then do some work.

Before I did this, retention was hard. Now, it’s effortless (a few minutes a day in Anki) or the effort is welcome (it generates a blog post). But, it does mean I put books down intentionally, and so I need a different one to read while I work on retaining the first one.

(I meant to write about what I’m currently reading today, but I thought it would be good to write about this first so I can reference it. I’ll get to my current reading list tomorrow)

NaBloWriMo 2025

In October, I committed to write a blog every day in November as a kind of NaNoWriMo, but geared to what I usually write. Of course, when November 1 came, I forgot.

Luckily, I am ok with backdating blog posts, so today (November 5), I wrote for November 1-4. I looked through my drafts and picked a few to finish, but it doesn’t look like I have any other drafts good enough to develop.

Here are some things that are going on with me recently (that I plan to write about).

  1. I have gone all-in on Python for web development.
  2. I started a project to implement the ideas in my book, Swimming in Tech Debt.
  3. I am about five months into learning Spanish.
  4. I’m starting on my experiments that will become my 2026 Yearly Theme.
  5. I am almost done with the print version of Swimming in Tech Debt, which should go on sale soon.
  6. I found a mutation tester I like (mutmut) and made a PR to it to add a feature I needed.

Teaching Your Book Before You Write It

In the Useful Authors group, I learned to test my book’s content by teaching it first. To some extent, I did that on this blog. But that doesn’t work as well as doing it in a way where you can get a reaction. This lets you figure out if what you plan to write will resonate with your audience.

With Swimming in Tech Debt, my main way of teaching the book was to talk about tech debt with my clients and my developer friends. I would also make LinkedIn posts with excerpts from what I was writing. So much of the book, though, is based on past conversations I had had for decades at work. Some of those conversations were meant as “teaching” via training, feedback, or mentorship. A lot of it was just figuring it out as a group.

I also shared chapters online in places where it was easy to give feedback (like helpthisbook.com). Some readers have invited me to speak to groups inside of their companies. Part 4 of the book (for CTOs) started as a presentation. I was also asked for an excerpt by the Pragmatic Engineer. His audience’s reaction in comments and emails helped shape the book. It let me know which parts were the most useful and worth expanding on.

One thing I didn’t do early enough was to turn my pre-book notes into conference pitches. I finally did do that after the first draft was done, and next week, I’ll be sharing that with QA professionals at STARWEST.

In all of these cases, you are the proxy for your book before you write it. You just tell people the things you plan to write. You are hoping that it leads to a conversation where you learn if your ideas are worth writing about.

Marketing First When Writing a Book

I’ve been writing on this blog for over 20 years. I’ve also released some open-source and a few apps. You have probably never heard of them.

But, when I decided to write a book in January 2024, I joined the Useful Books community, which stresses doing marketing and product design (on your book) up front. It’s paid off.

I opened Swimming in Tech Debt for pre-sales a week ago. On Monday, I woke up to being #1 in my category on Amazon.

In retrospect, these were the most important marketing moves I did:

  1. Pick an audience (tech team leads) and then pick a conversation about a problem that they regularly have (tech debt) and write the book that would be your solution to that problem (what you would say in that conversation). The goal is to be recommended by your readers when the topic comes up.
  2. Write in public and share it. I started in January 2024 and shared what I had in February and March. If I had not done that, the book would be 50 pages and finished in June 2024. It wouldn’t be as good and no one would have heard of it (see my previous projects).
  3. Increase the surface area of luck. I posted my chapters in all of my communities to get feedback. Gergely Orosz happened to see it and asked me to pitch for his newsletter that reaches more than one million readers (many in my target audience).
  4. Build an e-mail list. I used Kit (formerly ConvertKit). That list is the reason I reached #1 in my category today. They have been reading chapters and giving feedback all along, so I am very encouraged that they bought the book (because they know it best).

I am keeping the book priced low during pre-sales, I would appreciate if you would buy a copy. It will go to its regular price in a couple of weeks.

Any Thing Can Be a Blog Post

I’m catching up on this blog (I Write for Yesterday when I skip a day), because it’s been hard for me to think of topics. For me, it’s February 7, and I just wrote the February 4 post about the Fantastic Four teaser’s portrayal of AI a few minutes ago. I actually had the idea for this post first, which was going to incorporate yesterday’s, but I broke that out to stand-alone.

This is all to say, I think it’s always (or very often) possible to turn anything you think of into a blog post, or any Thing-based media, if (like me) you spent a lot of time watching YouTube recaps of the FF teaser. I wasted a lot of time on February 4th doing that, but I believe in Monetizing Waste, and even though this blog doesn’t make money directly, I got two posts out of it, so that’s enough.

Sweep Edits for My Book

I learned about the concept of sweep edits from Joanna Wiebe’s talk at a Business of Software conference. The basic idea is that when you edit a piece, you pick one kind of thing to fix and do only that in a sweep. Then, you go back to the beginning and pick another problem and do a new sweep.

I hired an editor to help me with Swimming in Tech Debt, and I’m looking through the revisions and suggestions and trying to figure out a process for making the next draft. I was talking to someone about this earlier, and then I remembered that I should do sweep editing. I do this for blog posts, but for some reason, it didn’t occur to me right away when I got the edit back. The revisions and comments beckoned me to address them serially, but I should not do that.

Here is what I think my sweeps will be

  1. Make factual corrections. The editor might have inadvertently changed the meaning of something with a change. I want to get the text back to being accurate.
  2. Address comments. The editor made suggestions and I need to just go through each comment and decide what to do. I need to either reject the comment or add it to a todo list. I’ll resolve the comments that don’t need more writing and leave in the ones that do.
  3. Relate the text to my central metaphor of swimming rather than drowning.
  4. Read it aloud. I want to make sure it still sounds like me.

After this, I will have a list of things I need to write, so I’ll do that list one by one. I will try to group them into sweeps that are of a similar type and then amend the above list to make it easier for the next chapter.

I am sure that this list is wrong, but it’s a starting point for now.

January 2025 Blog Roundup

In January, I posted every day. Here were the themes:

I brought my podcast back. I kept it in season 4, which is about the lessons I’m learning while writing a book about tech debt.

Writing every day is part of my marketing strategy for the book. I outlined that here:

I wrote a bunch of articles about Code Review. I had written If code reviews take too long, do this first in December. Here are some follow-ups.

I did a series of 3 posts about how to triple the number of posts you write:

I wrote a few posts about AI

I’m also proud of this toot:

Post by @loufranco@mastodon.social
View on Mastodon

Which I thought of while revisiting We Keep Reinventing Injection Attacks

I’ve been getting interested in helping entry-level developers more. These posts are what I think about it:

Supernote Manta: Review at Four Weeks

I got a Supernote Manta about four weeks ago, and I wrote Supernote Manta First Impressions after using it for two days. Looking that post over, the only thing different is that I found out that you can use handwriting instead of typing in a lot of contexts by tapping the globe icon that shows up on the keyboard. This is marginally better than typing (which is very bad), so I still hope that it can get better in software updates. But, those impressions were about the visceral feel of the device, not how useful it is in practice.

After four weeks, I continue to be happy with Supernote as a replacement for paper journals. I have been using paper for my whole life, so I didn’t think this would be possible, and maybe it’s specific to me, but here are the reasons why I find it better than paper:

  1. My ideal journal has a lot of pages. In 2024, my journal was almost 400 pages. It has gotten too big to carry. On the Supernote, I don’t have to think about this at all. I created a custom journal that has a page for each day and a lot more.
  2. I like editing. I have come to rely on undo and cut/paste. I never had this with paper and didn’t consider this when moving to a tablet, but now I realize how important it is to me.
  3. It’s also great for reading. The Supernote with the Kindle app is as good as my Kindle device, which I don’t use any more. So, in addition to not lugging my paper journal, I can also not take the Kindle (which was always in my daily carry).
  4. It has all of my journals. I keep different kinds of journals. I have my daily, bullet-like journal, but I also have project specific ones and others (see Write While True Episode 21: Dedicated Journals). They are all slowly being migrated into the Supernote.

All of this would not matter at all if the writing on the device wasn’t comparable to paper. It is.

For me, the biggest downside (compared to paper) is that it is monochrome. I practice Two Color Journaling, where most writing is in black and important things are in red. I have been using other cues to highlight (symbols, boxes, the highlighter). It’s ok. I don’t think the new Remarkable (with color) would meet my other criteria, but it’s something to think about for the future. I guess I hope that color e-ink becomes ubiquitous and is available in a future Supernote.

Why Even Triple the Number of Posts You Write

In Triple the number of blog posts you write and the follow-up to it, I gave some examples of how to triple the number of posts you write. This is the third post in that series, where I will tell you why I even think this is a good idea.

Again, I will turn to Art and Fear [affiliate link], because another lesson I learned from it is that the point of making art is because of the effect it has on the maker. Writing is how you become a writer, so doing it more will make you better, faster.

I prefer that reason to something like: the Google algorithm prefers it, or it’s easier to share on social media, or your AdSense revenue will go up if readers need to click around. There are no ads on this site, so I don’t care about CPM prices or page views. I would love for my SEO to be better or for more people to share my work, but the best way to do that is to just make a lot of good work.

I have no idea which posts will do better than others. I have written before that the highest traffic page from search is my UML Cheatsheet. The second highest had been my explanation of the tech that The Wizard of Oz used to make his ghostly head. Those two posts are over 10 years old. Lately, my review of the Supernote Manta has climbed to the top of that list. I would never have predicted that these would draw the most search traffic.

In Blog Posts, Randomness, and Optionality, I wrote that every post is a lottery ticket to some future benefit. I can’t predict what will happen to each one, but I know that having a lot is good.