Author: Heidi Waterhouse
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The Seven Righteous Fights: Documentation
This is the fourth fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. I’m a technical writer, so you knew I’d get here. Documentation is not a secret! I often deal with product and business people who want to put the documentation behind a login. They want…
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The Seven Righteous Fights (LISA 16)
Usually we think of compound interest as what adds magically to our retirement or makes our student loans last forever. But there is also a compound interest of technical debt, where a project is made harder and more expensive because of early “cost-saving” choices. I think it’s empowering for developers and other people involved in…
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The Seven Righteous Fights: Extensibility
This is the third fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. What can you do that would make your product more extensible, more configurable, easier to put into the ecosystem you are trying to serve? I always explain APIs as a sort of Lego connector…
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How to write a lightning talk
This week I was at Write/Speak/Code, a conference designed to teach technical women how to excel in other parts of their careers. It was amazing, soul-filling, and sometimes painfully honest. I was asked to mentor a group of nine women for Speak Day. We had a couple hours for them to write and deliver lightning…
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The Seven Righteous Fights: Security
This is the second fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. Contrary to what you may have heard, the internet is not actually a series of tubes connected by guys in ski masks. There are bad actors out there, but your product probably won’t attract…
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The Seven Righteous Fights: Localization
This is the first fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. Are you ever planning on selling this to someone in another country? Or someone who doesn’t speak your company’s primary language? I’ll tell you right now: Yes, you are. There’s a big wide world out there,…
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Many hands make a messy wiki
In October, I attended HydraConnect. To my relief, it was not a networking event for evil comic book characters, but rather an in-depth conference for people running the Hydra software, which is used in higher education (and other library-like places) to organize digital collections. When I walked in the first day, I didn’t even know that…
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Guest post at Authentic Engine blog
I have a guest post up today at Authentic Engine. Using your “whiskers” to detect disruptions Authentic Engine is a consultancy based on emotionally smart management and fostering workplace inclusivity and team emotional safety.
