Writing as an engineering skill

The best engineers I know write well. Not necessarily prose, but clear explanations: pull request descriptions, incident reports, RFCs, and comments that answer the next engineer's question before they ask it.

Writing forces you to structure your thoughts. If you can't explain why a decision was made in two paragraphs, you probably don't understand it well enough yet.

I keep a simple rule: every PR description must include the problem, the chosen approach, and the trade-offs considered. It takes five minutes and saves hours of review time.

Documentation is not overhead. It is a multiplier. The code tells you what happens; the writing tells you why.