A few weeks back, I attended ELC Annual 2024, a conference hosted in San Francisco focused on software engineering managers. It’s a small circle of engineering people managers in the Bay Area, and a select set of folks who care to attend conferences dedicated to this somewhat specialized role. So as much as I wander through the various sessions and panels, I particularly enjoy reconnecting with like-minded acquaintances every year, to share career updates and gossip about this amusing industry of ours.
This year, although my name card held the title, I formally left my role a few weeks before the conference took place1. I was pleasantly surprised by how many people read my retrospective, knew I was a free agent, and politely inquired about next opportunities. Consequently, my practiced reply of “not much, maybe work on my blog more” was a bit…well, underwhelming, even to myself as I explained the rationale. Hence, I’m writing this post, to tug at this thread a bit more forcefully.
allenc.com started in 2011. I was a software engineer at Google at the time, but had already decided that the company’s culture and emphasis on engineering-led project work wasn’t a fit for what I wanted to do with my skillset and my career. I figured that I needed to differentiate from all the other engineers in Silicon Valley somehow, and building a brand via blogging—partially inspired by blogging luminaries like Joel Spolsky and Raymond Chen—seemed reasonable. At the time, people wanted to read about getting into Google, and argue about whether JavaScript was a reasonable language.
It turned out that “aspiring engineering luminary” took much more work than throwing out blog posts once in a while, and I was too busy trying to be a decent engineer—and eventually, engineering manager—to make a name for myself in the tech community. At one point, I experimented with site monetization and threw AdSense on the front page, but with the niche content and the lack of SEO, the attempt to make a living out of writing stuff online was short-lived.
Writing informally, though, for as long as I’ve done it so far, is fun. I often liken coding to writing as an expression of creativity, and while some other engineering managers scrounge for spare time to scratch that itch of creation via technical side projects, I’ve opted to write about it instead, spending late nights while the kids are asleep to punch out another 200 words before climbing into bed. The raison d’être for this blog evolved into a creative outlet, particularly for those days and weeks when the stresses of management got acutely fierce.
Over time and repetition, you develop a distinctive writing style and voice. It’s a written tone that’s encoded in the vocabulary and sentence structure; in the punctuations used, and how the paragraphs flow—or not, but intentionally so—into one another; in the metaphors and allegories chosen to make points; in which articles to call back to, ideas and hypotheses and areas of interest that define said prose. It’s this voice that differentiates, at least for now, human authorship from AI-generated works, and on some level adds value to the writing beyond its informative content. This texture of voice is something that I’ve working on and have been refining through the years, and I’m hoping it shows in how these posts come together.
Eventually, I started to reap the benefits of practicing written communication, especially for management tasks. It’s a boon to be able to hammer out executive emails, strategy documents, and architectural overviews and know that the writing will be professional by default, not having to go back and edit it 3× before sending out the communications. I’m not good enough to be a C-level executive who spits out terse, grammatically questionable communique that gets charitably interpreted as busyness, so I’d rather be elegant instead.
I’ve also heard from folks who have looked me up via this blog before a job interview, or accepting a job offer where I was the hiring manager2. That’s probably a good thing: better for someone to know the philosophies and working style of their to-be boss spelled out over years of written articulation, beyond what they can glean from an hour-long sales pitch.
Now that I don’t have these manager-related use cases, my focus here goes back to the pure act of writing, for its own sake. In particular, I’d like to write faster and necessitate fewer re-edits, building towards higher daily and weekly word counts and exercising better economy of time and effort. I’d like to explore longer articles, and potentially fiction as well; it’s a wholly different domain of creativity that has beckoned ever since I read the first Wheel of Time book as a kid.
And this simple, humble blog is a perfectly fine canvas.
