This week I was at Write/Speak/Code, a conference designed to teach technical women how to excel in other parts of their careers. It was amazing, soul-filling, and sometimes painfully honest. I was asked to mentor a group of nine women for Speak Day. We had a couple hours for them to write and deliver lightning...
If people can’t use your software, you have already failed as a developer. This talk digs in to how optimizing for search and using the existing technical assistance forums can put your product ahead of the pack. Technical writing, in all its variations, is a type of interface with your product. It incorporates everything from...
If people can’t use your software, you have already failed as a developer. This talk digs in to how optimizing for search and using the existing technical assistance forums can put your product ahead of the pack. Technical writing, in all its variations, is a type of interface with your product. It incorporates everything from...
We talk a lot about minimum viable products, and building our products up from small features. We talk a lot about failure, and how to learn from it and not replicate failures over and over again. But what I haven’t heard a lot of discussion about is how we know we’ve succeeded. Is it market...
Cassandra was a prophetess doomed to be accurate, but never believed. In my role as a technical writer, I often have the information needed to make useful observations about development processes, communication problems, and other organizational troubles. The problem is getting people in power to agree with and act on the information I present. This...
I don’t know of any parenting books that tell you how to choose baby’s first handle. I don’t know of any self-help books that tell you how to help your parents create a digital estate plan. Both of these scenarios and many more are falling to the people who have always been responsible for maintaining...