What does solving a 300-year-old mathematical problem can teach software engineers?

Welcome back, fellow engineers!

Did you hear about Fermat’s Last Theorem¹. Neither did I until this week.

Watch how Sir Andrew John Wiles found the solution to this problem with the help of writing.

Nothing proves the importance of writing better than this story. Watch the next 20 seconds and raise your hand if this has happened to you while documenting a bug!

Enjoy!

Transcript: In September, I decided to go back and look one more time at the original structure of Flach and Kolyvagin again to try and pinpoint exactly why it wasn't working, try and formulate it precisely – one could never really do that in mathematics, but I just wanted to set my mind at rest…

➡️ Key Takeaways

• Writing is thinking.

• Writing is organizing your thoughts. A problem, organized, is a problem half-solved.

• 3 ways to get better at writing

📝 Why write?

When Sir Andrew Wiles was ready to move on, he decided to document and publish why his attempts didn’t work.

That’s how he solved a 300-year-old problem.

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As software engineers, we spend a lot of time with our thoughts.

But writing is also thinking.

Next time you’re stuck with a bug, I encourage you to document it so that:

• someone else can look into it using all the data you already provided, but most importantly

• you think through it

To formulate a problem so others can understand it, you have to think different.

I see this in remote teams frequently:

It’s complicated to explain, but I’ll have a solution soon™️².

Well, that’s precisely why you should try to write it down.

But people often think:

Let me just spend one more hour with this. I can do it!

Owning problems and setting out to solve them is a great thing to do.

When we encourage engineers to document their problems, we don’t want to take any of that away.

It’s all about turning thoughts into written form.

Here’s why.

🫧 How does writing affect your thoughts?

“Let me rephrase it” – remember the last time you said this? It was when you realized the other person doesn’t have the same context as you do, and what you said wasn’t clear.

I often feel my thoughts only make sense to me.

Thanks to writing, I can put them on paper and verify if this is true.

Writing encourages you to:

• Organize your thoughts. This doesn’t mean you have to come up with a solution, only to translate the contents of your head into an organized message.

• Focus on the essentials. You don’t have all the time to document your issue. To present your problem to a 3rd party, you must make sacrifices and limit what you want to communicate.

• Think through the problem again and again. When you nail the above two and have an email, Slack message, Jira, or GitHub issue, you’re looking at an optimized version of your problem. It’s like a unit test reproducing a bug you can run whenever you want.

💡 Take Action Now

By now, it’s clear that writing has plenty of benefits for software engineers.

So, how to get better at it?

Here are 3 places where I would start if I wouldn’t be writing already:

1. LinkedIn Collaborative Articles

When I began contributing, I realized it’s one of the best places to start for a couple of reasons:

1. Ready-to-use template - eliminate the Blank Page problem

2. Character limit - you must write more concise thoughts

3. Topics are already figured out - Search the Articles database for topics

2. Substack

Substack changed the way how we think about newsletters. Newsletters can be of any length and format as long as they:

• Provide value

• Respect the reader’s time

200 words or 1000, it’s up to you. Substack welcomes knowledge of any size and form, and it’s a great place to discover and connect with people from your industry who also write ➡️ more opportunities for you to learn from them!

3. Developer Blog

I talked about the numerous advantages my developer blog “passively” brought to me thanks to Inbound Marketing.

I almost hear you saying, ”Why should I write a blog now? Plenty of blogs are out there—professional stuff from the best of the best.”

Remember, your goal is not to create an industry-best blog.

But to get better at writing through the only proven way that works:

By writing more.

🗣️ Join the discussion

Already writing and getting better at it? How did you get started? What would you recommend to people who want to get into it?

Not writing yet? It’s a great time to commit to writing something regularly. What will you do?

📰 Weekly shoutout

1. 🏛️ 10 principles to get ahead in work and life by

   Fran Soto
   . There is no silver bullet to getting ahead in life only simple and proven systems. Doing less, but more of the right things.

2. Consistency matters. by

   Addy Osmani
   . Following the theme of self-improvement, Addy writes about the power of compounding actions, investing time into things you can control, and reaping the rewards after.

3. Monoliths, microservices, and serverless aren’t what you think they are by

   Dev Details
   . A great article with visuals busting some common myths about monoliths, microservices, and serverless architectures.

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1. To explain this unsolved problem, I’d like to quote the top commenter below the video. It’s the simplest explanation I’ve read so far:

Imagine it this way: You know the famous Pythagorean theorem, right? It says that in a right triangle, the square of the longest side (the hypotenuse) is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. In numbers, it's like (a^2 + b^2 = c^2) for a triangle with sides a, b, and c. Fermat's Last Theorem is a bit like a twist on this. It says that if you try to use powers higher than 2 (like cubes, fourth powers, etc.), there are no whole numbers a, b, and c that can make the equation true. So, for any power higher than 2, there's no equivalent to the Pythagorean theorem.

2. According to Blizzard’s Official Definition of Soon: “Soon” will arrive some day, Blizzard does guarantee that “soon” will be here before the end of time. Maybe. Do not make plans based on “soon” as Blizzard will not be liable for any misuse, use, or even casual glancing at “soon.”