Author: Heidi Waterhouse
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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…
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Crosspost from Opensource.com: How Do We Fix the State of Technical Documentation?
If we all agree that open source as a whole has a documentation problem, what can we do to work on addressing and fixing it? How Do We Fix the State of Technical Documentation? We have to talk about why people would be motivated to fix the problem before we can get them to do…
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Software and pink collars
Yesterday, I said this: The real reasons we don't have docs/ux/pm bootcamps/code schools/hack days: 1) They're coded as feminine2) They pay less Code patriarchy. — Heidi, Sticker Thoughtleader (@wiredferret) July 4, 2017 And I want to come back and address it in a bit more depth, because someone called it “a bold statement”, and it…
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Why are there no documentation bootcamps or schools?
Sarah Mei and Sarah Fox and some other people and I were talking on Twitter about code school graduates, and how they frequently do really well at mid-level positions because they have communication skills from their previous careers. Yeah, that is super interesting. Thanks for linking it. I guess that's why there's no writing boot…
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Open Source Citizenship Award
I was at Open Source Bridge this week, with my kiddo Baz. We were both giving talks, and I was giving a workshop on interviewing with Carol Smith. Also I got to MC the slideshow karaoke part of the after-party, which was huge fun. But the big news is that I won an award for…