I write about software development, tools, and people.
And how marketing makes it all better.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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Response to: Modern Technical Writing, by Andrew Etter
I’ll be honest. I’m a little mad I didn’t write this book. It’s clear, lucid, and pithy. I agree with much of the philosophy of minimal tooling and semantic separation of form and content. Etter says, Great documentation makes new…
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Guest post: SysAdvent!
I wrote a pitch for SysAdvent and got it accepted, and then realized that it was due right in the middle of all my travel, so it’s a good thing my volunteer editor was willing to work with me on…
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Nodevember Talk – Search-First Writing for Developers
This post is broken because Storify is gone. 🙁 [View the story “Nodevember – Search-First Writing for Developers” on Storify]
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Publish and pull managers
@kwugirl has done some great work around ask culture and guess culture (https://storify.com/kwugirl/ask-vs-guess-culture-communications-rubyconf-portu), and how frustrating it can be when you are framing communication the wrong way so that you are constantly rubbing on someone. Ask culture says that it’s…
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Why we must be prepared to kill off data
This post is broken because Storify is dead. 🙁 [View the story “The Death of Data” on Storify]