Photo by ThisIsEngineering on Pexels. There’s a specific feeling you get when documentation actually works. It’s not relief, exactly. It’s more like the feeling of asking a question and getting a straight answer from someone who knows what they’re talking about. Someone who anticipated what you needed, skipped the parts you already knew, and told you what to do without talking down to you. ...
Photo by Adam Dubec on Pexels. If you look at a standard corporate org chart, you’ll see neat little boxes. Engineering is over here, Product is over there, Sales is on the other side of the building (or the virtual workspace), and Support is tucked away in the corner. ...
Photo by olia danilevich on Pexels. There is a persistent myth that technical writers sit around waiting for a developer to “finish” a feature so we can write the documentation. In this version of reality, we are the stenographers of the software world, recording what happened after the dust has settled. ...
Photo by Brett Jordan at Pexels. In the Write the Docs Slack community, folks often ask how to go about deciding what documentation tool or set of tools is the right one to use. I have taken to replying often with a series of questions, instead of answering. Why the Socratic method? Because tooling for docs is a very, very circumstance-specific choice. No one answer is correct. As I have often said in Write the Docs and elsewhere, I firmly believe that a good technical writer can create great docs with pretty much any toolset. Yes, even Microsoft Word, though we might shudder while doing so. ...
Photo by Startup Stock Photos from Pexels. Curious about what a technical writer can do for you? Here are twenty-five things you might find a technical writer doing in their job on any given day: Interviewing a subject matter expert to learn more about what they are writing about. This might be a product manager, project lead, developer, customer, salesperson, developer advocate, end user, nearly anyone who might touch or use what we are a writing about. ...
Photo credit: by Sara Kurfeß at Unsplash. I started using Git and GitHub for docs in 2019. It’s been a slow build, but I’ve finally started to learn some helpful ways of going about things. So there are two GitHub specific tips I want to share with you that have helped me out in my day to day. Choose where a repo’s notifications go For the longest time, I just let all of my notifications go to whichever default email address I had defined. This meant that all of my GitHub notifications wound up going to my work email, because work had the majority of the notifications. ...
Photo by Pixabay at Pexels. Why is good knowledge care critical? Every business, small or large, has a body of knowledge around its existence. The business has one or more products or services it sells. It has processes for how to obtain, create, or use the products or services. It has sales documents and collateral. There are accounting charts and customer lists. How to manuals and vendors. Hire onboarding and competitive analyses. The knowledge goes on and on. ...
Photo by Samson Katt on Pexels. Good docs have (at least) six key characteristics: Findable For documentation to be worth the time spent creating it, the user needs to be able to get to those docs when a problem or curiosity creates a need for information. The best docs do nobody any good if they can’t put their hands or eyes on them when they need them. ...
Photo by Alexas Fotos from Pexels. There are many flavors of technical writing. Mine is software. One of the constants of any software team is the change that comes with employee churn. People find new opportunities by joining your team. People find new opportunities and leave your team for elsewhere. ...
Photo by Moose Photos from Pexels. I would like to thank the tech writers in the Write the Docs Slack’s #lone-writer channel for bringing these ideas to the top of my mind. Everyone suffers from a bias of familiarity when looking at our docs. Once you read something once, the next time you read it the mind can anticipate and insert what it remembers and expects to be there. This happens whether the expected word or phrase or punctuation is there or not. ...