Slides, notes, and lessons learned at the STC Summit 2015 in Columbus, Ohio

I recently attended the STC Summit 2015 in Columbus, Ohio. I gave both a workshop and presentation on REST API documentation. This post includes my slides, links to notes, and some thoughts.

My upcoming workshop and presentation at the STC Summit 2015 in Columbus, Ohio

I'm giving both a workshop and presentation at the STC Summit in Columbus, Ohio. I'm also receiving an award for oustanding guest-edited issue of the Intercom.

How to avoid early death from sitting down all day

Sitting down all day creates serious health risks. You can avoid an early demise through a little counter app that reminds you to take a break every 20 minutes.

How do you authenticate your documentation?

Authenticating documentation poses significant challenges with identity access control. Ideally, customers should only see documentation for products they purchased. Rather than creating separate sites for each audience, a content management system can map viewing rights to user groups.

My daughter published a real video game through "Girls Make Games" camp

Girls Make Games is game programming camp for girls. My daughter participated in it last year, and the game she and her team made is now available to download.

Check out my conversation on ContentHug

ContentHug is a content curation service focused on tech comm. Currently the site has a theme of conversations with various tech comm pros, mostly about content strategy.

How can technical writers cut through engineering jargon and decode complex information?

As technical writers, we know our task is to explain how complex products work through simple, easy-to-understand language. But before you can explain something, you first have to decode that complexity for yourself. You can decode complexity by approaching it piece by piece, asking engineers for details, drawing pictures, experimenting, and more.

Why no one stopped by my technical writing booth at career fair day

I hosted a technical writing booth at my 8th-grade daughter's career fair day, but almost no one stopped by. Deflated, I tried to analyze why. I realized that in becoming an adult and family provider, my world-view shifted to a focus on survival and profit, which is far from the world-view of students.

Moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll

I moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll because I want to use the same publishing paradigms for both tech comm and the web. Jekyll also loads more quickly.

Integrating Documentation into engineering code and workflows

If you want to encourage engineers to write documentation, integrate your writing tools and process into their toolchain and workflow.

API technical writing course on Udemy from Peter Gruenbaum, and some thoughts on documenting JSON

Peter Gruenbaum's API technical writing course on Udemy is an excellent starting point for learning API documentation. He explores one of the more difficult parts of API documentation, which is describing JSON and XML data structures (usually in responses).

Switched commenting systems to Disqus

Just a heads up, with comments on my blog, I'm now using Disqus as opposed to the native commenting system in WordPress. This means you'll need to log in using one of the four methods provided by Disqus (Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Disqus) to leave a comment. Why did I switch from WordPress' native comments to Disqus? Several reasons: Too much spam gets past Akismet. For every real comment, I have to delete about 10 spam comments. I'll...

Introduction to technical writing -- slides and audio recording

Listen here: A few weeks ago I gave a presentation to a small group of beginning technical writers in India. The presentation was a 20 minute introduction to technical writing, and I gave the presentation over Skype. Slides Here are the slides: Links to more information This presentation is similar to another introductory podcast I recorded on technical writing some years ago.

API Documentation presentation to East Bay STC chapter -- slides and recording
API Documentation presentation to East Bay STC chapter -- slides and recording

The other week I gave a introductory presentation on API documentation to the East Bay STC chapter in Silicon Valley. Here are the slides and recording.

How to design documentation for non-linear reading behavior

User-centered documentation 1.0 Podcast: How to Create User-Centered Documentation, Interview with Joe Sokohl 1.1 Writing User-Centered Documentation, or, My Best Days as a Technical Writer 1.2 New series: User-centered documentation ...