Writing Helps The Thinking Process

After starting to make a concerted effort to write about software engineering and testing, it’s helped to clarify my ideas. This is obvious really, especially once you’ve started doing it yourself.

Writing the post about the testing Angel of the North anti-pattern helped me clarify the ideas in my mind. During the writing process I raised and then largely answered many questions, which only arise once you try to explain something to someone else; this is often referred to in the development world as Rubber duck debugging.

It also helped improve my PHP script for combining and minifying multiple CSS files by forcing me to double-check my original implementation and in doing so discovering a service, called REDbot, to check HTTP resource behaviour.

I am sure it will help me in the future to clarify my ideas, encourage me to discuss topics with more people and generally improve my knowledge (and writing skills).