Category: Industry
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Is this the gate you want to keep?
Today on Twitter, I said: I really want everyone to stop conflating coding skill with technical skill. Tech is so much bigger than code. Or it could be. — Heidi, Sticker Thoughtleader (@wiredferret) August 16, 2017 That’s a lot of response for me. Like “Livetweeting @kelseyhightower” levels of reaction. So let’s stop and talk…
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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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New job title: Developer Advocate
I’ve had a lot of job titles in my career: Technical Writing Intern Queen of Documentation (It was 2000, OK?) Technical Writer I, II, III Technical Communicator Senior Technical Writer Technical Writing Consultant Documentation Architect Documentation Mercenary You might notice a theme there. I’ve been a technical writer for a lot of different companies, because…
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Software and pink collars
Yesterday, I said this: The real reasons we don't have docs/ux/pm bootcamps/code schools/hack days: 1) They're coded as feminine2) They pay less Code patriarchy. — Heidi, Sticker Thoughtleader (@wiredferret) July 4, 2017 And I want to come back and address it in a bit more depth, because someone called it “a bold statement”, and it…
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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…
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The Cardinal Virtues? of Technical Writing
First, a disclaimer: Medium served me this article, but it’s a year old. Weird. Nonetheless, I have things to say about the content. The Virtues of Technical Writing, by a pseudonymous writer Introduction They are gleaned from a Bachelor of Science degree in Scientific and Technical Communication from the University of Minnesota’s Writing Studies Department,…