Best practices
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…
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?…
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…
Why are there no documentation bootcamps or schools?
Sarah Mei and Sarah Fox and some other people and I were talking on Twitter about code school graduates, and how they frequently do really well at mid-level positions because they have communication skills from their previous careers. Yeah, that is super interesting. Thanks for linking it. I guess that's why there's no writing boot…
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…
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…
Upcoming appearances
Velocity Berlin
Minneapolis DevOps Meetup
DeliveryConf