Brace yourself, because I’m about to utter a sequence of words I never thought I would hear myself say:
I really miss posting on Twitter.
I really, really miss it.
It’s funny, because Twitter was never not a trash fire. There was never a time when it felt like we were living through some kind of hallowed golden age of Twitter. I always felt a little embarrassed about the amount of time I spent posting.
Or maybe you only ever really see golden ages in hindsight.
I joined Twitter in 2009, and was an intermittent user for years. But it was after we started working on Honeycomb that Twitter became a lifeline, a job, a huge part of my everyday life.
Without Twitter, there would be no Honeycomb
Every day I would leave the house, look down at my phone, and start pecking out tweets as I walked to work. I turned out these mammoth threads about instrumentation, cardinality, storage engines, etc. Whatever was on my mind that day, it fed into Twitter.
In retrospect, I now realize that I was doing things like “outbounding” and “product marketing” and “category creation”, but at the time it felt more like oxygen.
Working out complex technical concepts in public, in real time, seeing what resonated, batting ideas back and forth with so many other smart, interesting people online…it was heady shit.
In the early days, we actually thought that Honeycomb-style observability (high cardinality, slice-and-dice, explorability, etc) was something only super large, multi-tenant platforms would ever care about or be willing to pay for. It was the conversations we were having on Twitter, the intensity of people’s reactions, that made us realize that no, actually; this was fast becoming an everybody problem.
Twitter was my most reliable source of dopamine
It’s impossible to talk about Twitter’s impact on my life and career without also acknowledging the ways I used it to self-medicate.
My ADHD was unmanaged, unmedicated, and unknown to me in those years. In retrospect, I can see that my only tool as an engineer was hyperfocus, and I rode that horse into the ground. When I unexpectedly became CEO, my job splintered into a million little bite sized chunks of time, and hyperfocus was no longer available to me. The tools I did have were Twitter and sleep deprivation.
Lack of sleep, it turns out, can wind me down and help me focus. If I’ve been awake for over 24 hours, I can buckle down and force myself to grind through things like email, expense reports, or writing marketing copy. Sleep deprivation is not pleasant, it’s actually really fucking painful, but it works. So I did it. From 2016 to 2020, I slept only once every two or three days. (People always think I am exaggerating when I say this, but people closer to me know that this is probably an understatement.)
But Twitter, you dear, dysfunctional hellsite… Twitter could wind me up.
I would go for a walk, pound out a fifty-tweet thread, and arrive at my destination feeling all revved up.
I picked fights, I argued. I was combative and aggressive in public, and I loved it. I regret some of it now; I burned some good relationships, and I burned out my adrenal glands. But I would sit down at my desk feeling high on dopamine, and I could channel that high into focus. It’s the only way I got shit done.
I got my ADHD diagnosis in 2020 (thank the gods). Since then I’ve done medication, coaching, therapy in several modalities, cats… I’ve tried it all, and a lot of it has helped. I sleep every single night now.
That world is gone, and it’s not coming back
The social media landscape has fragmented, and maybe that’s a good thing. There is nothing today that scratches the same itch for me as Twitter did, in its golden years. And maybe I don’t need it in quite the same way as I used to.
Most of the people I used to love talking with on X seem to have abandoned it to the fascists. LinkedIn is performatively corporate and has no soul. I’m still on Bluesky, but it’s a bit of an echo chamber and people mostly talk about politics; that is not what I go to social media for. The noisy, combative tech scene I loved doesn’t really seem to exist anymore.
These days I use social media less than ever, but I am learning that my writing is more important to me than ever. Which is forcing me to reckon with the fact that my writing process may no longer fit or serve the function I need it to.
Most of those epic threads I put so much time and energy into crafting have vanished into the ether. The few that I bothered to convert into essay format are the only ones that have endured.
I’ve been writing in public for ten years now
Do you ever hear yourself say something, causing you to pause, surprised: “I guess that’s a thing I believe”?
A couple months ago, Cynthia Dunlop asked me to share any thoughts I might have on my writing, as part of the promotional tour for “Writing for Developers: Blogs That Get Read” (p.s., great book!). I wrote back:
There are very few things in life that I am prouder of than the body of writing I have developed over the past 10 years.
When I look back over things I have written, I feel like I can see myself growing up, my mental health improving, I’m getting better at taking the long view, being more empathetic, being less reactive… I’ve never graduated from anything in my life, so to me, my writing kind of externalizes the progress I’ve made as a human being. It’s meaningful to me.
Huh. Turns out that’s a thing I believe. 🤔
I wrote my first post on this site in December of 2015. It’s crazy to look back on all the different things I have written about here over the past ten years — book reviews, boba recipes, technology, management, startup life, and more.
Even more mindblowing is when I look at my drafts folder, my notes folders. The hundreds of ideas or pieces I wanted to write about, or started writing about, but never found the time to polish or finish. Whuf.
I need to learn how to write shorter, faster pieces, without the buffer of social media
From 2015 to somewhere in the 2021-2023 timeframe, thoughts and snippets of writing were pouring out of me every day, mostly feeding the Twitter firehose. Only a few of those thoughts ever graduated into blog post form, but those few are the ones that have endured and had the most impact.
Over the past 2-4 years, I’ve been writing less frequently, less consistently, and mostly in blog post form. My posts, meanwhile, have gotten longer and longer. I keep shipping these 5000-9000-word monstrosities (I’m so sorry 🤦). I sometimes wonder who, if anyone, ever reads the whole thing.
The problem is that I keep writing myself into a ditch. I pick up a topic, and start writing, and somehow it metastasizes. It expands to consume all available time and space (and then some). By the time I’ve finished editing it down, weeks if not months have passed, and I have usually grown to loathe the sight of it.
For most of my adult life, I’ve relied on hard deadlines and panic to drive projects to completion, or to determine the scope of a piece. I’ve relied on anger and adrenaline rushes to fuel my creative juices, and due dates and external pressure to get myself over the finish line.
And what does that finish line look like? Running out of time, of course! I know I’m done because I have run out of time to work on it. No wonder scoping is such a problem for me.
A three month experiment in writing bite sized pieces
I need to learn to write in a different way. I need to learn to draft without twitter, scope without deadlines. Over the next five years, I want to get a larger percentage of my thoughts shipped in written form, and I don’t want them to evaporate into the ether of social media. This means I need to make some changes.
- write shorter pieces
- spend less time writing and editing
- find the line of embarrassment, and hug it.
For the next three months, I am going to challenge myself to write one blog post per week (travel weeks exempt). I will try to cap each one under 1000 words (but not obsess over it, because the point is to edit less).
I’m writing this down as a public commitment and accountability mechanism.
So there we go, 1473 words. Just above the line of embarrassment.
See you here next week.