Okay, this sounds kind of odd, but hear me out. A developer friend recently told me about the "rubber duckie" method of coding. In a nutshell, you as a software engineer place a generic rubber duckie on your desk. Every time you make a big coding decision or implementation, you explain how it all works to the rubber duckie. If you find yourself straining for an explanation, or if you find yourself unable to even come up with something logical, stop. The duckie has served its purpose -- it's helped you expose a bug or design flaw or implementation flaw that otherwise might have gone unnoticed (until later when the build breaks and it's your fault, or a customer's app crashes and you lose a $2k sale).
This is why technical writers are valuable. We are living, breathing rubber duckies, forcing you to explain your code and decisions (so that we can explain them to users) and thereby helping you uncover errors, inconsistencies, or inefficiencies in your design. And also, because we're human beings, it doesn't look like you're trying to hold a conversation with a squeaky toy.
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