Be Objective with Your Work

It is a human inclination to hope things will work out, despite evidence or doubt to the contrary. A successful manager must resist this temptation. This is particularly hard if one has invested much time and energy on a project and thus has come to feel possessive about it. Although it is not easy to admit what a person once thought correct now appears to be wrong, one must discipline himself to face the facts objectively and make the necessary changes—regardless of the consequences to himself. The man in charge must personally set the example in this respect. He must be able, in effect, to “kill his own child” if necessary and must require his subordinates to do likewise. I have had to go to Congress and, because of technical problems, recommended terminating a project that had been funded largely on my say-so. It is not a pleasant task, but one must be brutally objective in his work.

A true master of a domain is objective about where they are weak and where they still have room to grow 202212270352 -- in fact, there is pleasure in knowing the game is not yet won!

make it a story. If you are writing about an application framework, use an example application and make it something real (a todo app, a real estate search app, something you have personal experience with).

• link to your other stuff. He has a good point about sidebars (don't do it), but if you have written about something tangential previously, links are a nice way to avoid that. Works for pointing to other people's work as well.
• just ship it. He alludes to this in the last point, but seriously, the perfect blog post that never is published is 100% worse than the 80% done blog post.
• remember that while you are obsessing over everything, your reader likely isn't. Recall how closely you read this article? That is how closely most readers will read anything you publish. * start with the end in mind (the title and the conclusion should be related and the thread should run through it).
• kill your darlings. If something doesn't fit, no matter how interesting or witty it is, copy it off to some other doc (possibly for another article). Or delete it. Either way, remove it from your piece.