Best practices
The art of deleting
I have a talk where I encourage everyone to be clear on the data they collect and keep. I encourage people to automate deletion so they don’t have to do anything extra. In the original incarnation of the talk, I said that everyone should apply konmari principles to the data they keep, only instead of…
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…
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 Speaker CFP Submissions
The way one becomes a Lady 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 you…
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 the timing. Day 17 – Write It Down or Suffer the Consequences This article has…
Guest Post on OpenSource.com
I was supposed to be at SeaGL this weekend for an awesome conference with the opensource world. Sadly, I fell in the garage and dislocated my shoulder, so I can’t attend. On the bright side, the post I wrote to promote my talk at the conference is available! Four Steps to Better Documentation In it,…
Becoming a welcoming open source project, Mentoring Branch
Cate Huston (@catehstn) asked what we could do that would get us from “open source” on a project to “welcoming source”. Codes of conduct, good newbie issues and good onboarding were her initial suggestions, and I said that a good project would also have a really clear goal, because one of my consistent frustrations with…
Upcoming appearances
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The Lead Developer London
Full Stack Conference London
Texas Scalability Summit