All my teammates are always excited about writing blog posts, but end up without any spare work time to do them. Hearing them say on multiple occasions they’d love to have some time for writing inspired me to try something a little different — a hack week, but with everyone entirely focused on writing 🎉
At Buildkite we do a hack week about every six weeks. We work on tasks or ideas that we’re particularly interested in that aren’t necessarily related to our regular work. The idea for Writing Week was that the team would spend a whole week up-skilling on writing. By the end of the week, everyone would have completed a blog post or piece of documentation and be ready to post it.
The end result: everyone was excited about writing! 🙌 We all had solid outlines and at least a first draft to continue working on.
I started out with a rather ambitious plan. I worked out when everything was going to happen, and practically planned it down to the minute 😅 The main things that I wanted to include were:
Since writing week, we’ve all continued working on the articles that we started. Check out the completed posts:
Running Buildkite Agent on Google Cloud Platform by Sam Cochran
5 ways we’ve improved flakey test debugging by Keith Pitt
Making Magick with Javascript by Jess Stokes
If you’re keen to do a writing week with your team, here’s three things to get you started:
If you do a writing day or week, we’d love to hear about it! Our friends at The Conversation did a writing day after hearing about ours and were psyched with the results 🎉
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