Hi, everyone. Uh I'd like to talk to you about why writing is important for a software engineering career. First, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Ner. I have been working as a front and engineer for the last four years.I have also been publishing articles to various publications such as Smashing magazine, CS S Tricks and more. I'm really excited to share everything I've learned about technical writing with you all today. Overall, I broke down reasons why I believe technical writing is important for a software engineering career into three main sections. Those sections are writing reinforces learning. It helps you build your personal brand and it improves your communication skills, which is a necessary skill in tech.

First, let's talk about why how writing reinforces learning. When I started my career in computer science, I found it challenging to learn about coding concepts to overcome this. I started writing articles about solutions. I came up with writing, gave me the time to reflect and identify my knowledge gaps. As I wrote, I explained what the code was doing and why it was a good solution which helped me reinforce my learning. Writing also helped me structure my thoughts and break down complex concepts into smaller paragraphs. I learned to organize my articles with an introduction, a body and a conclusion which made it easier to understand for myself. And readers writing reinforced my learning and it gave structure to the problems that I faced when I first started out. Additionally, I frequently encountered similar problems in my coding work. Writing about solutions helped me document the problem in a way that was easy to revisit later on saving me time and frustrations in the future. Writing articles also served as a great motivator for me when I first, when I struggled with an impostor syndrome and felt like I wasn't making any progress. Looking back at my past articles proved that I was in deep learning and growing.

It helped me overcome my current blockers by reflecting on my past struggles and how I overcame them in summary writing articles was an essential tool in reinforcing my learning in computer science field. It helped me identify my knowledge gaps. It helped me structure complex concepts.

It allowed me to revisit solutions later on and it motivated myself to keep pushing forward. Second reason why I believe writing is important is that it can help you build your personal brand over time. You can choose to focus on a specialty and write articles about certain topics of engineering. If you do focus on a specialty over time, your published articles can showcase your expertise in that particular field of area of software engineering, which can establish you as a thought leader in that field. For example, I am very interested in accessibility and most of the articles I write focus on it by writing articles. I learn more about accessibility and also showcase everything I am learning to potential clients and employers. Publishing articles will increase your visibility in the community and can attract attention from potential clients, collaborators and employers also consistently publishing articles will demonstrate your commitment and passion to staying up to date with the latest tools and technologies, which in turn makes you a thought leader in your chosen section of software engineering.

You can amplify your message by sharing your articles in your social media platforms. Your followers will be able to see what you are learning about. It's possible they can share your articles, which means their connections will see your articles and might want to connect with you.

Overall publishing uh articles is a great way to build personal brand over time and become a thought leader in your area. Before speaking about the third reason, I want to read a quote from the writing engineer in their first years on on the job engineer. Uh engineers spent roughly 30% of their workday writing while engineers in the middle management write for 50% to 70% of their day. Those in senior management reportedly spend 70% as much as 90% of their day writing this quote brings me to the third reason why I believe writing, technical writing uh articles is important for a software engineering career. Third reason is because writing and communicating is an, is an important part of software engineering. As you move up in your engineering career, you will have to write more and more with each level, communication skills are extremely important and a skill most employers look for when they are hiring, but not only that writing is part of software engineering. For example, engineers need to write read me documents that explains a service. Engineers need to write documentations. When we review code, we write code comments to others.

When we create pull requests, we have to write pull request descriptions that explain what the change is doing and why we may have to write product requirements. We write incident reports, we have postmortems where the issues are documented, not only for us but for future engineers as well.

Writing is part of software engineering, job description. There are so many errors where we have to write, taking the time to write technical articles will improve much needed communication skills that are needed for this career path. So now the question is how can you start today on this slide? I listed some publication sites you can check out today. The first two medium linkedin have relatively low barriers to entry. Both of these websites. You can make an account and start publishing right away. What's good about these two sites is that anyone can publish articles and slowly get better at writing. You can also have feedback from your c uh close connections and which will improve your writing over time. The next two websites, free code camp and hacker rank have a review process before publishing articles. You can start writing an article today and email their team a draft from there. You will be working with an editor to Polish an article uh before they publish it. What's good about these two websites is that you will be working with an editor to make your article better, working with an editor and getting someone to review your article will improve your writing over time. The next two websites smashing magazine and CS S tricks have a little higher barriers to entry in both of these websites. You will be working with an editor before publishing your article, same as Pre Coca and hacking.

But these two websites also pay when they decided to publish her articles. So not only will you get better at writing an article by working with an editor, you will be making money doing so and plus your article will be shared with their audience and all of their social media platforms, which will increase your exposure. But since they pay for their articles, they might not publish every single article proposal you sent their way. So no matter what level of writing you are in right now, no matter what level of engineering, software engineering level you are in right now. There is a website and a topic you can write about and get published today and I highly encourage everyone to do so. Thank you and you guys can uh reach out to me. My email is listed here and, and thank you for listening.