Here are links for my April 17, 2023 newsletter.
AI topics have saturated online posts ad nauseam, and I wouldn’t add yet another post to the endless list of speculative theorizing unless I believed I had a genuine light bulb moment. In this post, here's what I argue:–AI chat interfaces could become the primary user interface that people use to read documentation, not documentation websites themselves.–AI chats will enable novices to tackle more advanced tasks, leading to an explosion of technical innovation.–Documentation will provide the information source that AI chat engines need to respond to queries.–Both tech writers and machines will write the information source.
I've been using AI to look up vocabulary terms. Not just to provide definitions, but to provide sample sentences, etymology, and a mini poem to help remember the meaning. It's fun and a lot faster than looking up words one by one. The most fun part is the poem, which is often delightful.
I wanted to make it easier to create new blog post files in Jekyll, so I made a script that automates some of this functionality. (This is also an example of how AI tools can help you write code.)
The following are a few interesting links related to tech comm I've been reading this week.
The following are a few interesting links related to tech comm I've been reading this week.
I recently conducted an informal survey to find out the thoughts and concerns of technical writers about AI's impact on tech comm. 291 people responded to the survey. This post is a brief analysis of the findings. (The tldr here is this: change is coming quickly to the profession.)
The following are a few interesting links related to tech comm I've been reading this week.
The following is a short survey on the impact of AI on tech comm, specifically on technical writing and producing documentation. Many speculate that AI tools might soon automate many tech writing tasks, and there's growing concern that major disruption is imminent. Is that future dystopian, or will it unlock new opportunities? This survey seeks to take the pulse of tech comm, gathering the thoughts and feelings that tech writers have about AI and whether it will transform the practice of documentation.
I'm participating in an upcoming Stoplight webinar called API Trends Across the Lifecycle Webinar, along with James Higginbotham and Keith Casey.
In this post, I continue the series on systems thinking and tech comm, describing my experience in writing a documentation project plan for a large project involving multiple APIs. I argue that we should look at how APIs interact as a network rather than just documenting each API as a standalone part.
This post is part of a series that explores tech comm trends that I've either followed or forgotten, and why. The overall goal is to better understand the reasons that drive trend adoption or abandonment in my personal career. This post focuses on language-generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT and others.
In the introduction to this series, Sitting, standing, and walking, I explained a few experiments I've been trying, including treadmill desks, balance boards, and yoga balls. I'm trying to switch between sitting and standing more frequently while working at the computer. In this post, I'll provide some updates on how the experiment is going and what I've learned so far.
This is a recording of a presentation called Specialization myopia syndrome and the content journey, which I gave to a company's private tech comm event. With their permission, I'm posting it here. You can watch the recording via YouTube or listen the audio file as a podcast.
In this podcast, I chat with Adam Altman all about Redocly, an authoring/publishing tool for creating API documentation. Topics we discuss include why he started Redocly, the approach to API doc tools, what explains the continued popularity of Redocly, the docs-as-code approach to API tooling, and more.
