Category: Best practices
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The sticker bag
I talked about this a little bit in Lady Speaker Small Talk , but let me expand. I have a bag of stickers that I take to every conference I go to. This week, I leveled up my game from “gallon ziploc bag of significant antiquity” to “bespoke bag”. It only took me a little while to…
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Well, that didn’t go like I imagined
The Toggle Talk As a speaker, there are three things I count on to give a talk: Slides Narrative flow Speaker notes My dependence on these elements decreases as I give a talk multiple times, but I use the slides to help me remember where I am in the narrative even if I don’t refer…
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Our tools shape our worldview, or Least-bad Confluence techniques
If you have been in a conference open space with me, you know that I make a terrible yuck face whenever you ask me to talk about working with Confluence. I have yet to work with an instance of Confluence that didn’t make my soul hurt. But it’s not really the technology’s fault if I…
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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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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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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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Creative destruction
I was making a joke about the fact that I accidentally have two profiles for Open Source Bridge – one is with pink hair, and one with brown hair. Obviously, one of them is the mirror universe me. Probably the one with brown hair. No one with pink hair could be sinister, right? I said…