I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast Feed

Although it seems like documentation should be treated like other features worked on by a Scrum team, frequently it is not. When tech writers try to integrate into engineering Scrum teams, they usually run into a host of challenges. These challenges stem mainly from floating across multiple projects. Often doc tasks aren't assigned points or grouped in with other tasks in a real sprint, nor are tech writers co-located with project teams. This is a two-part post. In this first part, I outline problems for tech writers integrating into Scrum teams. In part 2, I explore solutions.

This is part two in a series on Agile and tech docs. In the previous post, I outlined challenges in integrating into engineering Scrum teams. Some alternatives to Scrum include Kanban, Extreme programming, Waterfall, and various productivity methodologies. The most compelling solution, to me, seems to be to form your own documentation-focused Scrum. This allows you to keep with the same project management approach and language in the company, while also allowing you to avoid the pitfalls previously described with integrating into an engineering Scrum. Even so, there's not an extremely compelling reason for docs to adopt Scrum, so its main aid might be to give you a disciplined approach to your doc work.

Although you can adjust your content's style to be simpler and more readable, technical documentation introduces many new terms and concepts for readers to learn. Many readers who don't already understand the discourse community may find this language impenetrable. Glossaries and inline tooltips can potentially help novice users, but there's no easy solution for simplifying your language for both novice and expert users.

Users turn to documentation when the pain of their ignorance exceeds the pain of learning. Unfortunately, this is the worst state of mind to try to learn anything in. To address this impatient state of mind, we need to write documentation in simpler, easier to digest ways. Task-based documentation gets us part way there. But the varying starting points, unique pathway needs, and messy branching complicate the promised simple linear nature of steps. Overall, we need to increase the simplicity factor in our docs much more than we generally do.

Although traditionally as a technical writer you don't run into too many ethical scenarios for docs, sometimes you have situations where your ability to be transparent about a system's limitations gets curtailed by marketing or product management. It can be frustrating to have your documentation filtered like this, but you can take comfort knowing that, given the decentralized nature of information on the web, where any user can post information in forums, blogs, and other sites, the information filtered out of your docs will eventually be published online (it just might not be published by you).

Here's the recording of the presentation I gave at the Write the Docs 2017 Portland conference. The presentation explores best practices for doc navigation, including principles such as hierarchy, modularity, progressive disclosure, entry point, and wayfinding. The presentation is about 20 minutes long, and you can either watch a video or listen to audio. Other WTD presentation recordings are also available.

I recently presented to the STC Twin Cities chapter on User-centered Design Principles for Organizing Documentation. When organizing your documentation, such as arranging navigation titles, workflows, or other wayfinding features, you can apply universal design principles to make your content more user centered. Some of these principles include Modularity, Hierarchy, Five hat racks, and Progressive disclosure. These design principles, based on solid user research from design gurus, will help users better find and navigate your help content. You can view the recording and audio from the event here.

Andrew Etter presented about his book, Modern Technical Writing, to the STC Silicon Valley chapter on January 24, 2017 in Santa Clara, California. In the presentation, Andrew talks about the strategies he implemented at Palantir to change to a new way of doing docs. This new way includes having a smaller team, using text editors, writing in plain text, processing pull requests instead of bugs, and more. He dives into lightweight markup syntax, static site generators, version control tools, and more, as well as challenges he has faced.

I recently gave a presentation titled Writing tech docs like a hacker with Jekyll to the to the Southern Ontario STC chapter (on Jan 18, 2017). In the presentation, I introduce reasons why we started using Jekyll, how static site generators differ from content management systems, how to get started with Jekyll, and challenges involved in using Jekyll for technical documentation sites.

Ralph Squillace, a senior content engineer for the Microsoft Azure Infrastructure team based in San Francisco, California, recently gave a presentation to the STC Silicon Valley chapter (on November 14, 2016) on Open Authoring -- Collaboration Across Disciplines. In the presentation, Ralph talks about Microsoft's approach to scaling their authoring and publishing efforts across the company by embracing Markdown, Github, open source tools, and other processes that allowed everyone in the company to write and contribute to Azure's documentation.

In this presentation, Alisa Bonsignore, a technical communication consultant based in the San Francisco Bay area, talks about how she developed confidence and experience in consulting with clients about writing projects. In the beginning, Alisa started out by apologizing for projects in which she worked excessive numbers of hours for little pay, often trying to meet last-minute requests that required late nights and zapped her work-family balance. But project by project, she started to understand how to interact with clients in a more professional, self-respecting way. Ultimately this helped save her sanity and build a stable income through a reputable business.

Last Monday we had a record turnout at our STC Silicon Valley chapter (with about 40 attendees). The topic was a panel discussion on how to thrive in agile environments as a technical writer. With 5 panelists all from different companies, the perspectives and practices they shared varied a bit, which showed the adaptations different writers and companies have made with agile to make the process work for them. This post contains a full description and recording of the event.

Sometimes I think that I've covered every possible topic on this blog that is possible to write about, and my muse becomes silent for a while. But then I remember the purpose of the blog -- to be a web-based log, or journal -- and I realize that the only reason I wouldn't have anything to write about is if I stopped having experiences, stopped reflecting on those experiences, and ultimately became a zombie. That zombie state is the death of any career.

Matt Ness, a technical writer at Splunk and a co-organizer for WTD San Francisco, recently gave a presentation to the STC Silicon Valley chapter called Let's Tell a Story: Scenario-Based Documentation. In this presentation, Matt talks about ways to integrate storytelling techniques into documentation, drawing upon his experience as a Dungeons and Dragons player and his player experience from other video game or fantasy worlds. To help users on their journeys and quests, you need a narrative to guide them and a manual to help them overcome obstacles. Video, slides, and audio from the presentation are included in this post.

Translation is a complex undertaking that usually requires you to take advantage of dynamic variables and other parameters in your source format in order to generate out different languages. Although most people think of static site generators as containing static content only, it's actually only static output. During the build process, you can take advantage of these more dynamic characteristics to handle rules for outputting to different languages. In this post, I explain some of the details you have to account for (includes, links, images, re-used content, etc.) when managing a translation project using a static site generator such as Jekyll.

Andrew Davis recently gave a presentation on finding developer documentation jobs (mostly for API documentation) in the San Francisco Bay area. The title of the presentation is Hunting for Dev Doc Work around the Bay. You can listen to the presentation recording, check out the slides, or just download the audio.

Up until two years ago, Anders Svensson and his colleagues, based in Sweden, provided DITA and XML consulting. They eventually created their own XML-based component content management system (CCMS) called Paligo, which includes a full set of documentation features to handle single-sourcing, translation, and other documentation needs. Paligo solves the challenges that Svensson's customers had been facing for years with other CCMS systems.

My previous post reviewing Andrew Etter's ebook on Modern Technical Writing got an enormous response. Some readers said the docs-as-code approach works only for small shops and doesn't scale to large projects. They said content re-use and translation also become problematic. However, perhaps the real differentiator shouldn't be product size as much as product category. The docs-as-code approach (which is what I'm calling it) works particularly well for developer documentation, such as API documentation, which usually doesn't contain the same challenges that component content management systems (or CCMSs) were meant to solve.

In Modern Technical Writing: An Introduction to Software Documentation, which is an e-book you can read on your Kindle, Andrew Etter argues for a model of technical writing that involves lightweight markup languages (like AsciiDoc and Markdown), static site generators (such as Sphinx), distributed version control systems (like Git or Bitbucket), constantly iterating/updating doc content on your website based on analytics, and more. Etter's book resonated with me because it articulates so many of the principles I've felt about how documentation should be.

Principles in Tim Ferriss' book The 4-Hour Work Week can be applied to tech comm projects. By focusing on the 20% of tasks that result in 80% of the results, limiting your focus to two mission critical tasks a day, empowering those around you to make decisions, and avoiding distractions from trivial tasks, meetings, and email, you can be much more productive in your work. More than crossing off a list of tasks, this approach will likely make your efforts matter.