Author: Heidi Waterhouse
-
The Death of Data: Signal 2017 edition
Twilio’s Signal conference had a lot of great parts, but I have to say I’m really impressed by their fast turnaround at getting video posted. Here is the recording of my talk on data retention, data destruction, and machine learning; Video: https://youtu.be/93ewk2pooAw Slides [View the story “The Death of Data at #signalconf” on Storify]
-
5 Years Behind the Mic
5 years ago, I kicked off the conference-speaking section of my career, with this classic hit: So many things about this! Like, uh, I’ve dyed my hair and learned to take my lanyard off and stopped using FrameMaker and Prezi. But also, this core theory is the basis of so many of my talks now.…
-
Lady Conference Speaker: Slides
Once you get a conference talk selected, you’ll want to put together the talk. There are speakers who can give entire talks without any visual aids, but most of the rest of us count on having some pictures to look at and prompt us. There are entire books written on slides – I liked Presentation…
-
Post on Opensource.com: How to nail a tech writer job inteview
I was excited to write another post for opensource.com: How to nail a tech writer job interview It’s an extension of a twitter rant I went on a bit ago, about how important it is to know certain things about interviewing as a technical writer, but no one is teaching them, from what I can…
-
Human Indexing
One of the consequences of cheap storage is that we have no incentive to reduce the amount of data we keep. We believe that we’re going to be able to search for whatever we want. But we are starting to exceed our human capacity to filter the returned results of our searches. Algorithms will help…
-
New Workshop at Portland Write the Docs
I’m excited to announce that I’m going to be presenting a workshop associated with Write the Docs in Portland! Write the Docs is an exciting community-based conference that draws in a mixture of technical writers, support folks, independents of all stripes, API writers, open-source developers, and a wide variety of other types of people. We…
-
Documentation Debt
People always talk about technical debt, but what about documentation debt? Has anyone ever given a talk on ways to avoid it? — Taylor Barnett (@taylor_atx) February 27, 2017 It was a good question, and a lot of people jumped in to answer it. I’ve given a talk on avoiding product design debt — That’s…
-
My Philosophy of Technical Writing
I said earlier on twitter that I like interviews because it gives me a chance to talk about my philosophy of technical writing and how I’d go about implementing it. Good friends reminded me that the ideal way to talk about one’s philosophy and implementation is while being paid a respectable hourly rate. That is…
-
Lady Conference Speaker CFP Submissions
The way one becomes a Lady Conference Speaker is by speaking. That’s pretty obvious. But how to do you get someone to give you a stage and a microphone and an audience? That’s what this post will partially cover. Specifically, how do you submit a talk proposal? Find decent conferences There are lots of places…
-
Hidden Figures, Shine Theory, and Being Friends with Women
I saw Hidden Figures this week, and I happy-cried at least three times during it. It is a blatantly heroic story about very feminine expressions of power. There is a trickster, a paladin, and a wizard, and although they each have their own missions and their own tribulations, they do it all in immaculate lipstick,…
