Why Every Software Engineer Should Write More

“Every developer should write.”

We’re at the beginning of the ‘everyone should learn to code’ area. With the ever-emerging developers’ forums, tech websites and personal blogs, we have much easier access to advanced coding knowledge than ever before.

For a software engineer, it becomes all the more important for you to keep up with the tech trend from the mentioned sources, otherwise, your competitiveness would be under great challenge.

But having access to such knowledge and information only gets you halfway. How so?

Because being at the receiving end doesn’t necessarily mean that you truly master what you ‘learn’ as a software engineer. You could start blank at a technical document for 30 minutes without understanding a bit of it (one of my embarrassing true stories).

What can be done differently?

“While we teach, we learn.

The learning-by-teaching effect has been proved by many studies. Just as the name entails, by teaching someone else, we learn better ourselves. In other words, teaching what we learn is the other half of our learning journey.

That said, from my standpoint, writing is the best way of learning. Why would I say that? Read on and you’ll see.

Why do I say writing is the best way of learning, especially for software engineers?
Why do I say writing is the best way of learning?

Writing helps you code better, and vice versa

Coding and writing actually require very similar skill sets: you need to be capable of

  • thinking clearly,
  • planning,
  • organizing,
  • explaining clearly and concisely what you have in your head,
  • revising and editing your work till it’s almost close to perfection,
  • learning and practicing new industrial knowledge…

The list goes on and on…

By sharpening your writing skills, your coding skills grow as well.

For instance, if you are to write a good copy, possibly a big project, you need to break down the topic, find and select evidence you need, and order your points in a compelling way, and then start the writing process. This is almost what you’d do if you are to write codes for excellent software.

Writing helps you know more about your codes and yourself

Just like writers, software engineers need to learn non-stop. With the knowledge and information updating so rapidly, it’s a big challenge for these two groups to keep up with the trend, let alone being on top of it all.

But as we mentioned, teaching helps you learn better. By writing down what you learn, to you or to others, you have a chance to see clearly how far you’ve gone in the learning path.

Let’s think of it: you need to know what you learn by heart so as to write something about it, which requires you to learn more than what’s given in just one or two documents. During the process, you’ll see your weaknesses and strengths, and therefore, be able to fix what needs to be fixed.

By writing what’s in your head down clearly, you learn how to communicate effectively with different groups, especially when you have an audience of various backgrounds.

Different points of view

As software engineers, we usually have a very confined working scope, where we only need to talk to designers and other developers about work. The downside about this is, you’ll find your mind confined as well if you don’t seek a way out.

Writing is the way out.

By writing for different audiences, for different purposes, you’ll have to see things from different perspectives, and thus you’ll be able to think in other people’s shoes. Such a rare trait will help you understand your clients better, and therefore write better codes and programs.

In addition, by sharing your viewpoints, the others are more or less likely to be influenced, taught, and inspired by you. How fascinating is that!

Writing allows you to see things from different perspectives.
Writing allows you to see things from different perspectives.

But, but, but

By now, I guess the voice in your head is more of “But I don’t know how to write.” than “I need to write NOW!”

No one is born a writer, just like no one is born a software engineer. It takes tremendous training, learning and practice, just like anything else.

And to eliminate the learning curve, you should always start from something you’re familiar with. Pick something you find most comfortable to talk about, and choose the writing app that won’t stress you out, then start from there. Our brains just love what looks and sounds familiar to us.

Markdown writing

For a software engineer, you’d find markdown writing most familiar and easiest to accept as one of the first steps that you start your writing as a learning path.

Why markdown, you ask? Because:

  • years of experience in the industry may have trained you to focus on the more important things, like how you can better think and type in a distraction-free environment;
  • your time is too valuable to be wasted on setting up the writing environment, getting familiar with all the bells and whistles in most of the WYSIWYG editors;
  • instead, you might want to add all of your formatting styles right into the text as simple inline syntax rather than using all the features.

This is basically what a markdown writing app does.

Among all the apps, Inspire Writer stands out. With its simplicity and core features, this markdown editor helps to build the distraction-free environment for you to write in, and you’ll find the writing process so smooth and entertaining: just you and your thoughts, and nothing more.

Inspire Markdown editor in Dark Mode
Inspire Markdown editor in Dark Mode

Download Inspire now to enjoy the most comfortable writing environment that it creates for you. It now offers a 7-day free trial, with all pro features waiting to drive your writing workflow.

Or you can purchase Inspire Writer if you find it of great help to your writing goal from here:

Buy Inspire Writer
Buy Inspire Writer

Over to you…

Do you think that software engineers should write more than codes? What are your suggestions for software engineers who’d love to write more? Feel free to share with us what you think in the comment section.

Happy writing! 🙂

Import Ulysses Markdown Files to Windows

Ulysses, one of, or to be more exact, the best writing app on the market nowadays, sure deserves its popularity among creative writers.

But, its exclusiveness to the macOS and iOS could be a headache for writers who prefer the Windows system. To be more exact, we write anywhere and anytime, on the sofa, at a coffee shop, and it’d be ridiculous if we can’t have access to our work just because we’re working in different environments, i.e. Windows, Mac, and iOS.

The External Folders feature on Inspire is the game-changer. How so? Read on and you’ll see.

One of the challenges for working on different platforms, or in different environments, is that app developers might not develop an app exclusively for an environment, so it’s sometimes impossible for you to use one single writing app on all your devices. Ulysses is a case in point: it has only Mac and iOS versions, but not Windows, which is the most popular operating system.

To make cross-platform possible, Inspire first allows you to sync your work on a third-party cloud service provider such as Dropbox and OneDrive. Then you can import folders from these cloud service providers to Inspire. By doing so, you’ll have access to all your work as markdown files, provided that you have them all synced to the cloud.

That said, it needs to be pointed out that Inspire doesn’t really store your files or documents. All the saving and syncing are done by your cloud service provider, all Inspire does is for you to grab the .md files and edit them in whatever environment.

Here, with the example for Dropbox as the cloud service provider, let’s see how you can edit your .md files on both Windows and Mac:

1) In your Dropbox folder, create a new sub-folder to sync your documents. Let’s call it MySheetsSync. Skip if you’ve already such a folder.

2) Click the Add Folder… button to add MySheetsSync to Inspire.

Now you have full access to .md files in the folder listed:

You can select a sheet for further editing, or, of course, create a new sheet in this folder.

3) All changes to your files and folder will be synced if you also have Dropbox installed on Mac. That is to say, you can edit the synced .md files with Ulysses when you also add MySheetsSync as the ‘External Folders’ to Ulysses on Mac.

This is how multi-platform writing is made possible on Inspire.

Enchanted? Download the latest version of Inspire  and enjoy the 10-day free trial!

Cross-platform Writing App on Mac and Windows For Writers

Switching back and forth from writing on Windows and Mac surely is a big headache, especially when your writing app doesn’t support cross-platform editing, which means more wasted time and less productive workflow…

This has gotta stop!

The good news is, if you’re an  Inspire user, the thing is a whole lot different since Inspire 3.0.

Starting from Inspire 3.0, we have added support for the ‘external folder’. That is to say, now you can load, edit and sync your markdown documents, even when they are from different platforms, such as Mac and Windows.

In other words, you can well write your work on Mac with Ulysses at work, and can continue with the same document with Inspire on your Windows PC when at home. Or vice versa.

You no longer need a ‘Ulysses for Windows‘ on Windows, nor do you need an ‘Inspire for Mac‘ either.

This is all made possible by cloud services such as Dropbox: your .md documents are stored in the cloud, therefore, you can easily access the .md files even when they’re from different platforms.

Note that Inspire doesn’t store your files or documents, it just allows you to edit them. All the saving and syncing are done by your cloud service provider.

Here is how you can edit your .md files on both Windows and Mac with the help of Dropbox as an example:

1) In your Dropbox folder, create a new sub-folder to sync your documents. We call it MySheetsSync. If you’ve already such a folder, just skip this step and move on.

2) Click the Add Folder… button to add MySheetsSync to Inspire.

Now you have full access to .md files in the folder listed:

Add external folder to Inspire Writer.
Add the MySheetsSync external folder to Inspire.

You can select a sheet for further editing, or, of course, create a new sheet in this folder.

3) All changes to your files and folder will be synced if you also have Dropbox installed on Mac. That is to say, you can edit the synced .md files with Ulysses when you also add MySheetsSync as the ‘External Folders’ to Ulysses on Mac.

External folder added for cross-platform editing.
External folder added for cross-platform editing.

This is how Inspire handles multi-platform writing.

Note: Please don’t edit the same file on both Mac and Windows at the same time, or you’ll see multiple copies of the file created by Dropbox to prevent ‘conflict’.

Markup Languages – A Brief History From HTML, Wiki to Markdown

If you’ve been exploring the web design world for a while, you’ll surely see ‘markup’ or ‘markup language’ at one point or another. But what does it mean exactly? And how does it help you work more efficiently?

What is a Markup language?

By definition, a markup language  tells a document how to appear by processing, defining and presenting the information written in the combination of words and symbols. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a widely used markup language. As you may see by now, the ‘ML’ in HTML stands for Markup Language, just like what you see in XML and XHTML.

Now let’s take a look at the brief history of some of the most widely used Markup languages, and see how it becomes more and more popular among writers.

HTML: the most widely known and used Markup language

As an important part of the worldwide web, HTML is the earliest markup language available on the internet.

It uses certain tags and elements to markup the formats or even properties of text. Eventually, the browsers will render the text into different content of different styles.

For instance:

<h1> A heading line</h1>

This is a heading line using a <h1> tag.

<a href="https://www.inspire-writer.com">Inspire Writer</a>

This is a link with a <a> tag.

<center><img src="logo.png"></center>

This is an aligned center image named logo.png with an <img> and a <center> tag.

It’s obvious that HTML takes care of the format and style of the text.

There are over 100 similar tags in the latest HTML5 standard. These, plus the properties for each tag, like the href is the property for the link, make it so hard to know the rules and use them well. Especially when you’re just a writer, not a writer/developer.

This is why writers, who are not web developers themselves, started to find another way to write.

Wiki markup or Wikitext

In the mid-90s, wiki was designed to encourage people who didn’t know much about HTML to write.

By introducing fewer tags that are more targeted for writing, the wiki engine transfers the content created in wiki into HTML in a structural way. By doing so, wiki users don’t need to learn a massive amount of HTML tags and properties before they can write on the internet.

Here are three examples of how the wiki engine usually works:

To define a heading in Wiki:

=A Heading Line=

To define a hyperlink:

[https://www.inspire-writer.com Inspire Writer]

To make an image aligned center:

[[File:logo.png|frame|centre]]

It’s obvious that the simplicity that wiki is after is more on the form of tags, but to some extent, it still is closely connected with HTML.

In other words, when writing in wiki, you don’t really need to master so many tags, but fewer tags alone don’t make your work easy to read. Therefore, you will often find yourself distracted when reading your work in wiki.

Markdown: focus on writer’s experience first

About a decade later, that is in 2004, Markdown was created by John Gruber. It’s a light, easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format.

By saying light, we mean that Markdown uses fewer, well-selected tags which basically won’t be a problem to master in an hour or two for most users. It also means that developers for Markdown editors need to deal with fewer tags, which makes it easier to develop and maintain.

By saying easy-to-read, we mean that even though with Markdown tags added to the content, your work will still remain intact. That is to say, you can still easily read the content without getting disturbed by the tags you use.

Moreover, Markdown text can be easily exported to effective, well-structured HTML content.

In Markdown, this is how you define a heading:

# A Heading Line

This is how you insert a hyperlink:

[Inspire Writer](https://www.inspire-writer.com)

Doesn’t it look like what’s in the plain text email?

And it’s also very close to how you insert an image:

![](logo.png)

By now, you may wonder, how can I define the image as align center? The answer is, you can’t.

This is where Markdown is different, or updated from, wiki and eve HTML: Markdown doesn’t care about the format of the text, i.e. how the text is displayed, it cares more about the property of the text, i.e. what the text is.

For instance:

# A Heading Line

defines a heading.

But how will the heading eventually be displayed, what’s the font size, whether it’s bold or aligned center are not what Markdown care about. And these questions shouldn’t be what you, the writer, care about at this point.

Only when you’re exporting or converting your work to HTML, will the Markdown engine tells that this is a heading, and the format will be left to CSS.

By separating text content and styling, Markdown enables you to write without being confined to details such as text formats, while being light and easy-to-use. This is what makes Markdown popular on platforms such as GitHub and Reddit.

Moving on – Inspire Writer Markdown

By now, it seems that Markdown is the ultimate weapon for writers. But is it though? Can it meet all the needs? Of course not. After all, nothing is perfect.

As mentioned, easy-to-read is one of the many shining points of Markdown, but it only works on text. However, images are indispensable when it comes to writing, especially writing for the internet.

We need to understand that as a markup language that specifically targets at plain text writing, it’s normal that Markdown can’t display images when you’re writing. A case in point is the tag that we use above:

![](logo.png)

But you can’t tell whether you’re using the right image or not in this way. This could be the deal-breaker for some.

The Inspire Markup Language by Inspire turns the table.

When you’re writing on Inspire, you can enter (img), and Inspire will prompt you to choose an image for your work, and insert it to your document in real-time.

Inspire Writer Markdown allows you to add an image
Add an image when writing in Inspire Writer with Markdown

Just as you can also see from the image above, the tags will be highlighted, making your work even easier to read.

If you’re tempted, why not give Inspire Writer a go? Download it from here  and install as per the instructions. It now comes with a free 10-day trial, with all pro features included, so you can see for yourself the magic of Markdown writing.

Over to you…

What’s your story with Markup languages? Do you find it helpful in your work? Feel free to share with me your experience, or let me know if there’s anything that I missed in the comment section.

How to Disable Gutenberg Editor in WordPress?

As the modern, default editor in WordPress 5.0, Gutenberg was supposed to bring its WordPress users terrific writing experience. However, the WordPress community simply isn’t ready for Gutenberg.

Admittedly, Gutenberg looks better than the classic editor, with all the blocks for media-rich pages and posts. But for many of us who have already been so familiar with the classic editor, Gutenberg is too overwhelming. And not to mention don’t get me started on its comparability issues with certain themes and plugins.

This makes you wonder: can I get the old WordPress editor back?

Of course. Here is how you can revert to the old Classic WordPress editor:

1) Login to your site as administrator, and search for Classic Editor Addon in the Add new Plugin page. Then click Install Now to get it downloaded.

Search for Classic Editor Addon to replace Gutenberg
Search for Classic Editor Addon to replace Gutenberg

2) Activate it.

Activate Classic Editor Addon to disable Gutenberg
Activate Classic Editor Addon to disable Gutenberg

3) Viola! You’ve got your old classic WordPress editor back!

Alternative solution to disabling Gutenberg editor

The above approach could be just a temporary fix, since WordPress seems pretty determined to make Gutenberg the permanent thing.

Instead of living with what could kill your productivity, why not say goodbye to the not so reliable writing experience online and say hello to the real authentic writing experience?

Say, write and publish with Markdown? So you don’t have to decide the font for your content with the mouse, HTML or even CSS.

Minimalist Windows markdown editor like Inspire Writer creates a simple, safe, and clean immersive writing environment. But it doesn’t stop there. You can publish your work to your WordPress sites by hitting the publish button on Inspire. If PDF or DOCX is more to your appetite, by all means, export your work to these formats as well.

Publish your work to WordPress directly from Inspire Writer.
Publish your work to WordPress directly from Inspire Writer.

You can also see Inspire as your work folder, where your work will stay forever, until, of course, you erase it.

Download Inspire  and try it out today. Its 10-day free trial offer won’t cause you a dime to try. 🙂

Why Distraction-free Writing Is More Important Than Ever?

As a writer, it can’t be a surprise to you, really, considering the number of distractions and disturbance to your writing workflow. The buzzes and bling from your phones, the pop-up notifications on the corner of your desktop from your clients, coworkers chatting nearby, kids in the house screaming for “MUM!” or “DAD!” if you’re a stay-at-home freelancer… the list goes on and on!

It seems that everything is vying for your attention, but we only have 24 hours a day. So it’s important that you do more in less time. One simple way to get you there is to stay focus.

And to do that, removing the distractions around you could be step one. In other words, you need to create yourself a distraction-free writing environment first. But how exactly can you do that?

How to stay focused when writing?

It’d be incredibly frustrating and stressful when you have to remind yourself to stay focused constantly. But it’s actually not that bad. Just as the (made-up) saying goes:” To get distracted is human, to maintain 100% focus, divine.”

The important message here is that we can sharpen our focus, and keep moving closer to the divine end. And rest assured – your way to being distraction-free won’t be as hard as you may think.

Let’s start from some of the easiest things you can do, one step at a time until you reach the distraction-free state of mind:

  1. Prioritize your writing order. Ask yourself this:”What is more urgent and more important now?”
  2. Don’t multi-task. You have very limited attention, so save it for what’s more important, especially when it comes to writing.
  3. Set your writing goal and keep track of your writing progress.
  4. Remove all distractions. Mute notifications from your email, browser, and social media, go full-screen with your editor, and if possible, choose the theme you love for your editor to help you stay undistributed.
  5. Choose a distraction-free writing app that equips with all the necessary features for such a writing environment.

You may find ticking the first 4 boxes quite easy, since they’re pretty much what you do every day, and you just have to do them well enough. But what about choosing the distraction-free writing app?

Before you start Googling the above-mentioned keywords, I suggest that you keep in mind some of the most important features for a distraction-free editor.

What features do a distraction-free editor need to have?

To create yourself a distraction-free writing environment, the text editor or writing app needs to be equipped with the at least following key elements:

  1. The mouse is used as little as possible and there is no need for you to lift your fingers from the keyboard – It keeps you from distractions such as adjusting the text format.
  2. Defines text with simple markups rather than formats – This is how you won’t be distributed by deciding what format to choose for your content.
  3. Content is the only thing on the screen – No windows, no tabs, no menus, no status bar….. If it’s not content-related, it shouldn’t be there.
  4. Saves automatically & instantly and there better be no files or folders – You don’t deserve to start your writing by creating a file name first, nor witness your work going down the drain just because you forget to hit save every 5 minutes.
  5. Supports dark mode theme – So you can immerse yourself in writing at night without fatiguing your eyes.

These features are what make an editor be able to boost your productivity. You wouldn’t say no to higher efficiency, would ya?

That said, it is not strange that writing apps or editors such as Ulysses are getting more popular than ever. But it’s such a pity that developers for Ulysses haven’t created Ulysses for Windows, and they even claimed that they will never consider a Windows version of Ulysses. Too bad for its die-hard fans.

Luckily, Inspire Writer fills the blank. It creates a distraction-free writing environment on Windows, just so you can write elegant. Everything you want to see in a distraction-free editor, you can find it on Inspire.

Inspire now offers a 10-day free trial period, feel free to download Inspire Writer from here, then give it a try and see if it works out great for you in creating a distraction-free writing environment, like how it does for me.

Inspire Writer, distraction free editor for writing of all kinds

Over to you…

What’s your story about staying focused on your writing? Please feel free to let me know in the comments section. Also, if there are something that I’ve missed, or if you have a question that’s not covered here, pop it into the comments and I’ll be sure to answer it.

Happy writing! 🙂

What is Markdown – and why you should write, edit & format your work with Markdown?

For writers like you and me, writing is about sending out the messages you want to world to hear.

When you dig deeper, you’ll see that writing actually includes the following elements:

  • organizing your thoughts;
  • writing what’s in your head;
  • editing your work to make it top-notch; and
  • adding visual touches so your readers will see what you’re saying.

Much easier said than done! It’s not surprising that so many people find writing so hard to do. But it doesn’t have to – there are so many ways that can make the writing process easier, and even enjoyable.

Markdown, which is designed ‘to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose’, is one of the many that make your writing enjoyable.

Wait… what is Markdown?

Markdown is a lightweight markup language with plain text formatting syntax. It enables you to write with a light, easy markup language.

Compared with WYSIWYG editors such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs, a Markdown editor is unique in its own ways:

Markdown Writing Separates Text Attributes From Formats

When you’re writing in a WYSIWYG editor like Word, you need to write and constantly set format for your writing at the same time.

For instance, after you type out the title for your work, you need to get it selected and change its format – enlarge it, make it bold and/or make it align center, so you and your readers will know that this is the title, not something else.

You may also need a template to unify all your writing. In this case, you have to select the text that is supposed to be the title and set its format as “Heading”, so the text will be enlarged, bold, and/or aligned center.

Conversely, Markdown is a writing format itself. In other words, all your formats are added when you’re writing, so all you need to do is just write, not format-adding needed for your work.

For example, you add a # (hashtag) before you type out the title, and you define it as a heading. That is to say, the text format is the last thing you should worry about when writing with Markdown.

When you are at the last stage of your creation, i.e. when you export your work, the style you define for your work will grant it related formats by its attributes.

For example, when you export your work to WP Twenty Sixteen in Inspire Writer, you’ll see the heading aligned left:

Export from Inspire Writer to a WordPress Twenty Sixteenth theme website
Export from Inspire Writer to a WordPress Twenty Sixteenth theme website

When you choose to export as Georgia, you’ll see it aligned center:

Export from Inspire Writer to a Geogia theme website
Export from Inspire Writer to a Georgia theme website

That is to say, Markdown defines WHAT the text is, not HOW it is.

Simply put, the text format, or render, should be decided at the final stage, by your text attributes and the style you choose. It’s not what something you should, or have to worry about when you’re writing.

That said, markdown creates a distraction-free writing environment where you won’t be disturbed by what format to choose. Say goodbye to the mouse, keep your fingers stay on top of the keyboard and make your writing flow.

Markdown Writing Transfers Your Work to HTML in a Better Way

There is no doubt that writing nowadays can’t walk far away from HTML: Your work will eventually show up as HTML one way or another.

Have you ever tried to transfer the .DOCX file you composed with Word to an HTML file? If you have, and you’ve read its source file, you’d be appalled to see how much garbage it contains.

But work written with markdown is totally another story.

Your work will be transferred to clean, light HTML files. These are the types of HTML files that you need. For instance, you can put them directly onto your personal website.

Moreover, if your website is built on WordPress, you can hit the publish button in Inspire, and your work will be published to your site with just this one single click.

Markdown Writing Transfers Your Work Into Formats of Various Kinds

Markdown editors such as Inspire Writer can easily transfer your work into formats you would normally use: HTML as we mentioned, TXT, PDF and DOCX document for Word, you name it.

You can also export your work to a common markdown (.MD) file, so you can publish it to platforms such as GitHub.

Try Inspire Writer Today!

Apart from what have been mentioned, Markdown is perfect for anyone who thinks plain text is too basic, but word processors are too bloated.

Among all the Markdown writing app, Inspire Writer stands out from the crowd with its simple, clean interface, and the perfect distraction-free writing environment that it creates. Its Markdown syntax is very easy to learn too!

If you haven’t tried Inspire Writer yet, give it a shot. Download Inspire Writer from here to enjoy the smooth Markdown writing process that boosts your writing proficiency and productivity. It now offers a 10-day free trial, in which you can enjoy all the paid features and free tech support. 😉

Inspire Writer Markdown Writing Editor
Inspire Writer Markdown Writing Editor

*BTW, this article is written with and published from within Inspire Writer. 😉