"Write for one person"

Here is the incomparable Julia Evans advocating for directing one's writing at exactly one specific person. Notes: Julia's warning is about the failure mode of trying to write for everyone. There's another failure mode here, though: it's also bad to write for nobody. This might seem impossible, but it's not hard to find writing, including tech blogging, where the author is so caught up in some other goal ("being a blogger," expressing a certain mood or temperament, or whatever) that they seem not to be writing for readers at all. But, again, all of these are underrated: (i) writing for extremely niche audiences; (ii) writing for people whom you don't know, or who for all you know don't actually exist; (iii) writing for yourself; (iv) writing in order to have a stable reference for something you keep thinking. Many people (including me!) resist the idea of writing different pieces for very different audiences. John D. Cook is a good example of someone writing technical material at many…