Author: Heidi Waterhouse
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Writing exercise
As a developer advocate for LaunchDarkly, I need to understand the product in a bunch of different ways – at a technical level to give summaries of how to make integrations work, at a business level to explain how feature flags can save time and money, and at a rhetorical level, so I can quickly…
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Is this the gate you want to keep?
Today on Twitter, I said: I really want everyone to stop conflating coding skill with technical skill. Tech is so much bigger than code. Or it could be. — Heidi, Sticker Thoughtleader (@wiredferret) August 16, 2017 That’s a lot of response for me. Like “Livetweeting @kelseyhightower” levels of reaction. So let’s stop and talk…
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Retrograde tooling
We’ve reached a tipping point in technical writing, and we need to deal with it. The future is not going to involve producing documents, it’s going to be producing seamlessly integrated content in and around products, and that means we need to change our expectations around tooling. This is going to hurt, but hopefully in…
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New employment: LaunchDarkly
Last week I told you about my exciting new job title, Developer Advocate. This week, let me tell you about my exciting new employer! On Monday I started a job with LaunchDarkly, a startup that does feature flags as a service. Feature flags are a way to distribute software with reduced risk. For example, if…
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Why on earth would developers WANT to write documentation?
This week I was at DevOpsDays Minneapolis, which was an amazing, warm, and inclusive event. There were at least three open spaces on documentation, communication, and related problems, and I didn’t propose any of them! The question the devops world keeps asking, over and over again is, How do I get developers to write anything?…
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New job title: Developer Advocate
I’ve had a lot of job titles in my career: Technical Writing Intern Queen of Documentation (It was 2000, OK?) Technical Writer I, II, III Technical Communicator Senior Technical Writer Technical Writing Consultant Documentation Architect Documentation Mercenary You might notice a theme there. I’ve been a technical writer for a lot of different companies, because…
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Consulting retropsective
I’ve been doing Agile for too many years to feel like I’ve learned something unless I identify it with a proper retrospective. I’m about to start an FTE job, and my consulting will obviously drop way off (but not entirely). So here we go: What went well I passionately loved the independence. I could fire…