A kind of post I would like to read more of is “I did X, and here’s
how it went.” You tend to see this most with research, but I’ve
enjoyed reading them on all sorts of things. This is one of the
mainkindsofpostIwrite, and I would encourage others to
give it a try!
Here’s an arbitrary selection of writeups I’ve enjoyed:
Exposure to problems that I didn’t know were important to people.
Detailed looks at how people handled problems.
They’re generally very concrete and written after the fact,
which makes it harder to write something that’s neat but wrong.
When I’m thinking of doing something and find a writeup by
someone who did something similar it’s fantastically useful.
When you voluntarily make something public, you do risk that people
will irresponsibly beat
you up over failings. I think it’s generally worth it to go ahead
anyway, tell the whole story, and help build a norm of sharing things
so others can learn.
More writeups!
Link post
A kind of post I would like to read more of is “I did X, and here’s how it went.” You tend to see this most with research, but I’ve enjoyed reading them on all sorts of things. This is one of the main kinds of post I write, and I would encourage others to give it a try!
Here’s an arbitrary selection of writeups I’ve enjoyed:
DB-19: Resurrecting an Obsolete Connector
Your room can be as bright as the outdoors
After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation
Wood joint strength testing
Giving Tuesday retrospective
Zeo sleep self-experiments
Hexing the technical interview
EAGxBerkeley 2016 Retrospective
My Business Card Runs Linux
Major reasons I like writeups include:
Exposure to problems that I didn’t know were important to people.
Detailed looks at how people handled problems.
They’re generally very concrete and written after the fact, which makes it harder to write something that’s neat but wrong.
When I’m thinking of doing something and find a writeup by someone who did something similar it’s fantastically useful.
When you voluntarily make something public, you do risk that people will irresponsibly beat you up over failings. I think it’s generally worth it to go ahead anyway, tell the whole story, and help build a norm of sharing things so others can learn.