I’m a huge fan of The Recompiler, and not just because they sometimes publish my work. I support anyone who spends the time and effort to publish articles that are useful, thoughtful, and frequently action-oriented. Carol Smith (of OSI board fame) and I put together a workshop for people who are doing technical interviews for...
Corey Quinn, slasher of AWS bills and frequent conference speaker, had me as the first guest on his brand-new podcast, Screaming in the Cloud. We had a great time talking about feature flags, the all-iPad conference setup, testing in production, and how I feel about technical documentation. And if you’re like me and don’t always...
I wrote a 2018 User Experience Prediction at UX Booth. Amy Grace Wells asked me what I thought was going to be a leading theme in UX in the next year, and I said, “better accessibility”. I think that’s both a serious prediction and a hope, because there is never enough accessibility, but I also...
I recently got a chance to write a post about API hospitality for the Capital One DevEx blog. It’s always nice to be able to rework a talk into an essay that’s easier for people to refer to.
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...
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...
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 hires productive in days instead of weeks, prevents thousands of calls to customer support, is...
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...
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...
This is a series derived from my popular talk “The Seven Righteous Fights”. It’s not an exact transcript, but I think having a written form to refer people to greatly increases accessibility and gives me room to expand my thoughts in a way that is not compatible with speaking. There are seven fights that I...