Refactoring English: Writing and Self-Publishing with Michael Lynch

Available on your favorite podcast platform. In this episode, Michael Lynch returns to discuss finishing and self-publishing Refactoring English, his book on effective writing for software developers. Michael is a former Microsoft and Google engineer who founded and sold the TinyPilot hardware business, and writes about indie software at mtlynch.io. Where the book stands: written out of order over 19 months against a six-month estimate, now in its first full read-through, with a 1.0 release targeted for mid-August. He treats the ebook like software — ship 1.0, then keep improving. Why a writing book for developers when 80–90% of the techniques are universal: the value is in the framing and the examples — commit messages, pull request descriptions, and design documents rather than generic prose. Structuring for return on investment. Reader surveys said one thing and reader confusion said another, so he ordered chapters so that someone who stops a third of the way through still gets the most value. Chapter two is a single page: read your writing aloud. Writing in your own voice. Readers rejected a chapter on "content marketing" and accepted the same material as "finding customers through blogging" — people buy the book because they want his thinking, not the expected framing. AI and writing: why relying on AI parks you at a local maximum, and Michael's rule that AI should act as a teacher and never write into your documents. The biggest anti-pattern he sees in developer writing — meandering into implementation details before establishing why the reader should keep going — and the journalism parallel of the inverted pyramid. Writer's block, focus, and phase separation: writing and looking things up are different activities, and mixing them costs you the flow state. Releasing in public: a Kickstarter that went from 60% to 120% of goal in the final days after a Hacker News front page, and how early access feedback supplied motivation more than it supplied edits. Cutting aggressively — publishing less than half of what he writes, "kill your darlings," and using a Git repo as the safety net that makes cutting easy. Self-publishing lessons: regional pricing (and why Stripe makes it harder than it should be), cross-promotion learned from an indie romance novelist, and roughly 600 customers to date. The toolchain: Asciidoctor for PDF, HTML, and EPUB output and its limits on layout control; Nix for reproducible builds and pre-commit checks; Hugo for the website; a custom word-word tool for repeated words; Cliff suggested Typst as a Word replacement for nicely formatted PDFs like datasheets. Reading recommendations: The Elements of Style, Joel Spolsky's software writing, and Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick. Discuss this episode at our community site.