HEIDI WATERHOUSEBlog Posts
The best time to shovel your driveway is immediately after it snows, but failing that, any time before you have driven on it. Driving on fresh-fallen snow compacts it into something between “ice” and “pure evil”, depending on the temperature, humidity of the air, humidity of the snow, etc. I just went out and shoveled...
Best practicesIndustryJuly 27, 2017by Heidi Waterhouse
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?...
Best practicesFebruary 27, 2017by Heidi Waterhouse
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...
This is the fifth fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. Affordance is what the interface makes easy and obvious. Affordances tell us all sorts of things about the tiny interactions we have with the world, and with software. Most people talk about the affordances...
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...