Second Brain

“Someone Should Write About This”

The Story

Boris got deep into TypeScript and realized something: nobody was writing about it. The language had features that would impress the most advanced programmers (conditional types, literal types, mapped types), but there were no good resources explaining them.

“Someone should do this. It’s crazy it doesn’t exist. This language is just magnificent.”

So he wrote the book himself. “Programming TypeScript” (O’Reilly, 2019) consumed a year of his life. “Would not recommend it,” he says.

But the ROI wasn’t in book sales. Off the back of the book, he started the San Francisco TypeScript Meetup, which became the world’s largest at the time. That’s where he met people like Ryan Dahl (creator of Node.js) and other “famous JavaScript celebrities.” The experience taught him that “all these people are just people. Everyone just builds cool stuff. Anyone can do this.”

He wasn’t the world’s foremost TypeScript expert when he started writing. He just saw a gap between how important the topic was and how little quality content existed, and he filled it.

Lesson for Creators

The best content opportunities hide in spaces where the quality of existing work doesn’t match the importance of the topic. When you think “someone should really cover this,” you’re the someone. You don’t need to be the top expert. You need to be the person willing to do the work. A book (or a newsletter, or a course) is a loss leader. The ROI is in authority, network, and opportunities that follow.

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