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by Jackson-Solway 2296 days ago
Good points all around! For the record, if you (or someone on your team) can write great posts quickly solo, that's awesome and I'd never dissuade it. But a lot needs to go right for that to be possible. For an individual to pull it off, IMO you need to meet these criteria:

- You yourself are doing something technically interesting

- You know enough about the project and/or topic to write on behalf of your team members and company. (Because posts on company blogs are perceived to represent everyone.)

- You need to be a competent writer. Sub-skills matter, too: editing, proofreading, creating visuals, and more. This simply takes practice, especially if you expect to move fast.

- It helps if you're a native english speaker, which many engineers are not.

- If you're truly doing it all yourself, you need to know your way around whatever CMS your company uses. Most engineers don't.

- You need to know enough to anticipate the repercussions. Love them or hate them, this is what Legal/PR/Comms are for.

If all this is true, yes, an individual can write a great post in a single day.

To answer your question directly, I was able to write my main comment quickly because:

- I was responding to something. I wasn't writing from scratch. Hot takes are easy ;)

- I'm a cofounder. AKA: I'm comfortable writing on behalf of my company. It's actually part of my job.

- HN comments are lower stakes than a blog post. No long-term SEO impact, for example.

- I've been doing this for 10+ years. And my 500 word comment still took me 90 min to write and edit.

- Yup, I'm a native english speaker.

- Probably some other factors I'm blind to at this point.