My Write of Passage Experience: Lessons, Community, and Favorite Essays

I knew I liked writing. But it wasn't until Write of Passage that I realized I loved it.

Whoa, that’s it. The final cohort for Write of Passage just ended this week.

I’m so glad that I joined — for the three essays completed, for the emotions I finally let out, and for the incredible people I met along the way.

Write of Passage

Write of Passage is a 5-week writing bootcamp led by David Perell. It included live sessions where he shared everything from “what to write” to “how to distribute”, alongside workshops by experienced writers. But the real highlight for me was the community – a group of people who genuinely love writing, and committing to these 5 weeks to focus on it, together. 

Writing used to be a lonely and daunting journey for me, especially in the Bay Area where we engineers are more fluent in Java than in English.

But Write of Passage changed that. I found my people.

We drafted essays, shared them with the group, and received feedback from professional editors and the community before we published. I thought I would hate that process. After all, I hate (receiving) code reviews — especially when people ask me to redo or restructure something.

But I was wrong.

Turns out, feedback has become my favorite part of writing. It does two things for me: first, it gives me the freedom to write anything. The simple idea that “what I write now isn’t what I’ll publish“ allows me to just vomit my thoughts onto the page and overcome writer’s block. Second, the “feedback exchange“ is the best kind of social interaction for introverts like me.

There were more than 300 amazing people in the cohort, and I could get to know them just by reading their writing and sharing feedback. And in return, I got to broadcast my raw ideas — sometimes, vulnerabilities — to them and connect with those who resonated with them.

It’s magical. Truly life-changing.

My Favorite 6 Essays From Peers

Six is an odd number. Not catchy at all.

I wanted to get to five and say, “Here are my top five favorite essays.“ And I tried, but I couldn’t let go of any of these six. I enjoyed reading each one of these too much, some even influenced how I think about certain topics. In no particular order, they are:

• On Taiwanese Names or: Call me Cheng-Wei, not Cheng, thank you by

  Cheng-Wei Hu

• Education is a Niche, Not a Profession by

  John Bruce Laing

• Save toilet time by

  Brandon Lee Weaver

• The issue isn’t awkwardness—it’s a lack of curiosity by

  Harrison Moore

• The Antidote to Writer's Block is Friendship by

  Rick Lewis

• Burning Man stories: How to figure out the unknown unknown by

  Chenshu Zhou

My Favorite Essay From Myself

Has to be “A love letter to Writing“.

Writing this piece gave me so many surprises. I did not even start with the idea to talk about the similarity between writing and coding.

I simply wanted to write about how I fell in love with writing as a kid.

But the epiphany that I had a few months ago about how similar writing and coding are just came naturally to the flow.

Also huge shout out to my editor

Nic Rosslee

and my peers for helping me complete the piece!

What’s Next?

Although Write of Passage has come to an end, this is only the first chapter of my writing journey.

I will keep writing. About tech, about writing, about my experiences in both.

After all, I’m a writer having an affair with programming.

Finally,

Something I’m experimenting with is at the end of each essay, write a short description, a prompt, of what my next essay is going to be about. If that prompt sounds interesting to you, please subscribe to my substack to read it when it’s published!

And if you have some thoughts about that, please feel free to comment below to share!

The next essay is going to be about “Turning 30 next month. Here are the 10 questions I have right now about the world, about my future.“