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Write the Docs Podcast episode 10: What's going on in our lives as documentarians and product owners

by Tom Johnson on Oct 10, 2017
categories: technical-writing wtd-podcasts

In this episode of the Write the Docs podcast, we talk about what's going on in our lives as documentarians and product owners. We don't have special guests during this episode. Instead, we discuss challenges we're facing and any interesting aspects of our documentation lives.

Topics discussed in the podcast:

  • Chris talks about challenges in collaborating with reviewers in efficient ways. Google Docs works great for gathering comments, but it isn’t so good for storing source code in a manageable format. Also, it seems that every company/client has their own preferred toolchain around reviews, and it’s hard to know the best approach to take.

  • Jared talks about the ebbs and flows of managing products in the gambling space, and the challenges around benchmarking, performance testing, and uptime demands for the products he manages, especially during the Melbourne Cup.

  • Tom is excited about the docs-as-code milestone reached at his work, where his team can now build and deploy Jekyll directly from the server through commits to an internal git repo. This publishing efficiency allowed their team to get rid of an old, archaic CMS publishing process that was slowing writers down.

You can view more podcasts at podcast.writethedocs.org. You can subscribe to the podcast using a variety of methods.

Links mentioned during the podcast:

About Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.

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