Stick to the basics

To write consistently, you must remove obstacles to putting words down. Most of those barriers will be internal, but don’t let the writing tools get in your way. The best writing tools of the Internet age bring the simplicity of a pencil and paper to the screen.

MacWright recommends that you never change the technology. His recommendation stems from a danger many technologist face; spending our time tinkering instead of writing (guilty ✋).

Rebuttal

How many of us select the simplest tool when we’re new at the job? We pick the one that we can get working. That’s never the simplest. So we have a conundrum. While tinkering keeps us from putting words on a page, as our skill develops we may need to replace our building blocks with what’s simple and durable.

This is particularly true of web technology. A problem arises, and a tool is build to solve it (jQuery, React). Everyone raves about the improvement the tool makes in the lives of code writers. The original problem is natively solved by web browsers. I think it’s worth stripping out the tool dependency in favor of a simple solution, even if it does detract from the original goal, to write online.

My rebuttal doesn’t really respect MacWright’s thought, since it shifts from writing words to developing code. An interesting diversion at best.