<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"><channel><title>Writing on Girish Shekhar</title><link>https://blog.girishshekhar.com/tags/writing/</link><description>Recent content in Writing on Girish Shekhar</description><generator>Hugo -- 0.163.3</generator><language>en-us</language><lastBuildDate>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://blog.girishshekhar.com/tags/writing/index.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/><item><title>Writing Is the Most Underused Leverage a Principal Engineer Has</title><link>https://blog.girishshekhar.com/posts/scaling-as-a-pe/3-writing-is-the-most-under-used-leverage/</link><pubDate>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://blog.girishshekhar.com/posts/scaling-as-a-pe/3-writing-is-the-most-under-used-leverage/</guid><description>Most Principal Engineers treat writing as documentation—a secondary activity that happens after the real work. But writing is the highest-leverage mechanism available at staff-plus scope. It scales mentorship, compounds over time, creates artifacts that outlive individual conversations, and builds the connective tissue for relationships you can&amp;rsquo;t maintain through meetings alone. This post covers why PEs underinvest in writing, what changes when they stop, and how imperfect artifacts often create more value than perfect silence.</description></item><item><title>How LLMs Work (Only What You Need to Know)</title><link>https://blog.girishshekhar.com/posts/llms-and-how-our-work-is-changing/2-how-llms-work/</link><pubDate>Wed, 22 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://blog.girishshekhar.com/posts/llms-and-how-our-work-is-changing/2-how-llms-work/</guid><description>A deeper look at how Large Language Models actually work — focusing on tokens, transformers, and training stages — explained in a way that helps engineers, product managers, and technical leaders reason about behavior and tradeoffs.</description></item><item><title>Why Large Language Models Changed the Game</title><link>https://blog.girishshekhar.com/posts/llms-and-how-our-work-is-changing/1-why-llms-changed-the-game/</link><pubDate>Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://blog.girishshekhar.com/posts/llms-and-how-our-work-is-changing/1-why-llms-changed-the-game/</guid><description>Large Language Models feel different from earlier machine learning systems. This post explains why — focusing on tokens, training data, self-supervision, and the architectural patterns that changed how we build software.</description></item><item><title>Why Now?</title><link>https://blog.girishshekhar.com/posts/why-now/</link><pubDate>Sun, 15 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://blog.girishshekhar.com/posts/why-now/</guid><description>Why I decided to start writing — and why now felt like the right moment.</description></item></channel></rss>