I have the fortune to review a few important blog posts every year and the biggest value I add is to call out sentences or sections that make no sense. It is quite simple and you can do it too. Without clarity only those at your company in marketing and sales (whose job it is to work with what they get) will give you the courtesy of a cursory read and a like on LinkedIn. This is all that most corporate writing achieves. It is the norm and it is understandable. But if you want to reach an audience beyond those folks, you have to make sure you're not writing nonsense. And you, as reviewer and editor, have the chance to call out nonsense if you can get yourself to recognize it. Immune to nonsense But especially when editing blog posts at work, it is easy to gloss over things that make no sense because we are so constantly bombarded by things that make no sense. Maybe it's buzzwords or cliches, or simply lack of rapport. We become immune to nonsense. And even worse, without care, as we become more experienced, we become more fearful to say "I have no idea what you are talking about". We're afraid to look incompetent by admitting our confusion. This fear is understandable, but is itself stupid. And I will trust you to deal with this on your own. Read it out loud So as you review a post, read it out loud to yourself. And if you find yourself saying "what on earth are you talking about", add that as a comment as gently as you feel you should. It is not offensive to say this (depending on how you say it). It is surely the case that the author did not know they were making no sense. It is worse to not mention your confusion and allow the author to look like an idiot or a bore. Once you can call out what does not make sense to you, then read the post again and consider what would not make sense to someone without the context you have. Someone outside your company. Of course you need to make assumptions about the audience to a degree. It is likely your customers or prospects you have in mind. Not your friends or family. With the audience you have in mind, would what you're reading make any sense? Has the author given sufficient background or introduced relevant concepts before bringing up something new? Again this is a second step though. The first step is to make sure that the post makes sense to you. In almost every draft I read, at my company or not, there is something that does not make sense to me. Do two paragraphs need to be reordered because the first one accidentally depended on information mentioned in the second? Are you making ambiguous use of pronouns? And so on. In closing Clarity on its own will put you in the 99th percentile of writing. Beyond that it definitely still matters if you are compelling and original and whatnot. But too often it seems we focus on being exciting rather than being clear. But it doesn't matter if you've got something exciting if it makes no sense to your reader. This sounds like mundane guidance, but I have reviewed many posts that were reviewed by other people and no one else called out nonsense. I feel compelled to mention how important it is. Wrote a new post on the most important, and perhaps least done, thing you can do while reviewing a blog post: edit for clarity. pic.twitter.com/ODblOUzB3g — Phil Eaton (@eatonphil) January 29, 2025

A small standard library means an explosion in transitive dependencies. A more comprehensive standard library helps you minimize dependencies. Don't misunderstand me: in a real-world project, it is practically impossible to have zero dependencies. Armin Ronacher called for a vibe shift among programmers and I think that this actually exists already. Everyone I speak to on this topic has agreed that minimizing dependencies is ideal. Rust and JavaScript, with their incredibly minimal standard libraries, work against this ideal. Go, Python, Java, and C# in contrast have a decent standard library, which helps minimize the explosion of transitive dependencies. Examples I think the standard library should reasonably include: JSON, CSV, and Parquet support HTTP/2 support (which includes TLS, compression, random number generation, etc.) Support for asynchronous IO A logging abstraction A SQL client abstraction Key abstract data types (BTrees, hashmaps, sets, and growable arrays) Utilities for working with Unicode, time and timezones But I don't think it needs to include: Excel support PostgreSQL or Oracle clients Flatbuffers support Niche data structures Neither of these are intended to be complete lists, just examples. Walled gardens Minimal standard libraries force growing companies to build out their own internal collection of "standard libraries". As one example, Bloomberg did this with C++. And I've heard of companies doing this already with Rust. This allows larger companies to manage and minimize the explosion of transitive dependencies over time. All growing companies likely do something like this eventually. But again, smaller standard libraries incentivize companies to build this internal standard library earlier on. And the community benefits relatively little from these internal standard libraries. The community would benefit more if large organizations contributed back to an actual standard library. Smaller organizations do not have the capacity to build these internal standard libraries. Maybe the situation will lead to libraries like Boost for JavaScript and Rust programmers. That could be fine. Versioning A comprehensive standard library does not prevent the language developers from releasing new versions of the standard library. It is trivial to do this with naming like Go has done with the v2 pattern. math/rand/v2 is an example. Conclusion My concern about the standard library does not stop me from using Rust and JavaScript. Furthermore, they could choose to invest in the standard library at any time. We have already begun to see Bun and Deno to do exactly this. But it is clearly an area for improvement in Rust and JavaScript. And a mistake for other languages to avoid repeating. While zero dependencies is practically impossible, everyone I've spoken to agrees that minimizing dependencies is ideal. Rust and JavaScript work against this ideal. But they could change at any time. And Bun and Deno are already examples of this.https://t.co/qkSh6oW1Yd pic.twitter.com/mY1MNErZG7 — Phil Eaton (@eatonphil) January 25, 2025

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