I recently participated in a Coffee and Content chat titled 'Ask Me Anything: Managing API Documenation Projects', with Patrick Bosek and Scott Abel, sponsored by Heretto. This was an 'Ask me anything' style chat, though the audience could only participate through chat on Brighttalk's platform. The coffee chat took place on Thursday, Jan 11, 2024.
Once a year, usually at the beginning of January, I look at my site analytics with the latest numbers from Google Analytics and also reflect on trends, changing directions, and other metrics for the year. This weekend I updated my site's analytics for 2023. The metrics were kind of harsh for my site this year. Page views were down 35%, users down 37%. Page views per session were down 12%. My top 30 pages were almost all to pages in my API documentation course — almost none of which were new in 2023. Accounting for the shift could be the many changes to Google's search algorithms, the changes in Google Analytics itself, the layoffs and industry slowdowns in tech comm, the expanding influence of AI, stale content, and other reasons.
![[Podcast] Breaking ground: New API documentation course at UW, with Bob Watson](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/thumbpostwatsonpodcastuw.png)
In this podcast, I chat with Bob Watson about an upcoming API documentation course he'll be teaching at the University of Washington. Bob has extensive experience working as an API technical writer at big tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. The UW reached out to Bob to develop this new course offering. The 14-week evening course will cover fundamentals like understanding developer behaviors, working with various types of APIs, publishing workflows, as well as hands-on practice. A key component is having students create API documentation portfolios they can use to demonstrate their skills.
I've been mulling over whether to write a trends post this year. There's so much uncertainty, it's hard to feel confident about how the tech writing profession will play out. But little trends-related ideas keep surfacing in the back of my mind, so I decided to write out some of my thoughts. Before I jump into this, I want to say that I’m much more agnostic and unsure about directions this year. 2024 could be amazing, it could also be terrible. Or everything could be overblown and remain more or less the same. One thing is for sure: in predictions, AI dominates the scene and discussion.
Although my blog usually focuses on tech comm, I've started reviewing books covering wider topics. I recently read Understanding Girls with ADHD: How They Feel and Why They Do What They Do, by Kathleen G. Nadeau, Ellen B. Littman, and Patricia O. Quinn. Several of my family members have ADHD, and I wanted to understand ADHD more to better support them. This book is one of the best ADHD books I've read, probably because I have four daughters (ranging from 13 to 22) and the book focused entirely on ADHD in girls. The book describes challenges girls with ADHD face in elementary school, middle school, high school, and beyond.
Etto is a new AI copilot from Heretto designed to help content authors harness the power of structured content more easily. In this Q&A, Casey Jordan, co-founder of Heretto, explains how Etto can reduce the complexity of XML authoring through guidance, content analysis and updates, refactoring, and other automations. Etto is focused specifically on structured content tasks and works collaboratively within documents so changes show up as track changes, like a human co-author. This allows for a conversational workflow. Unlike some competitor tools that rely on OpenAI, Etto's models remain completely within Heretto's platform for security and privacy. (Note: This is a sponsored post.)
These are some notes and thoughts from reading Robert Pirsig's classic philosophical novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, published in 1974. My reading here focuses more on the technical writing aspects and themes from the book. Some themes include Classic versus Romantic modes of thought, the concept of Quality, our relationship with technology, doing your own maintenance, caring about the work, peace of mind, systems thinking, multiple paths through a problem, troubleshooting, being in-the-scene versus removed, the road trip, effortless action, going with the flow, traveling along the backroads, and presence in the moment. I also include some questions about these themes to prompt discussion (these notes were initially prepared for a book club).
I recently gave a webinar titled 'Experiments and use cases for AI from a tech writer’s perspective' on December 8, 2023. The webinar was sponsored by the STC Washington, DC - Baltimore Chapter. In this presentation, I shared some personal experiences in using AI for different writing-related use cases, explaining what I’ve found helpful. These use cases and takeaways were all experiential, based on my experiments with using AI both in the workplace for documentation-related scenarios and writing on my blog.
In this post, I provide over 30 real-life examples of how I'm using AI on a daily basis, not just for technical writing tasks but more broadly in life, including summarizing content, explaining concepts, answering questions, troubleshooting problems, and having engaging conversations for a variety of tasks and scenarios. In my view, AI use cases are ubiquitous, equivalent to the use cases for computers or the Internet in general.
In this podcast, I talk with Ed Marsh about podcasting. You may have listened to Ed Marsh's Content Content podcast previously. As an experienced podcaster, Ed has a lot of insights and thoughts about podcasting. We discuss what initially drew him to start podcasting, the equipment and logistics involved in podcasting, different formats that engage listeners (from co-hosts to single person podcasts, and more), incorporating AI tools, why podcasters often go on hiatus, the ongoing appeal of podcasting, and more.
I recently participated in a webinar called Let's Talk API Docs with Scott Abel, Mark Wentowski, and Kartik Balasubramanian on December 13 at 8am PST. The panel discussion covered a wide array of topics, such as limitations of autogenerated API documentation, security in API docs, tailoring documentation to user needs. We also discussed challenges such as standardizing API documentation as well as opportunities for improving the developer experience.
In this episode, I chat with Dan Grabski, a senior content developer based in Portland, both about his recent WTD talk titled 'Zen and the Art of Manually Creating API Documentation' and Robert Pirsig's 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.' Dan explains the importance of focusing not just on technical details of implementations but also on integrating the people side — on understanding the perspectives of different users and stakeholders involved. Dan provides examples from his engineering background to illustrate how intuition develops from experience, how to avoid spectator mode through hands-on exploration of APIs, on carving out time to devote to continual learning, and the value of incremental progress. Overall, it's a great conversation about engaging more deeply with technology to write better documentation.
Speakeasy is a platform aimed at simplifying the creation and consumption of APIs. Its primary product is the creation of SDKs (client libraries), but its new offering (and most relevant to technical writers) is the 'Code as Docs' product. Their Code as Docs product embeds SDKs into the traditional API reference, providing users with code snippets in 8+ languages and bridging the gap between documentation and real-world applications. This post is a Q&A with Sagar Batchu, CEO and co-founder of Speakeasy.
In this short podcast, I explore using AI tools to do research, the potential for fake URLs, and how to deal with the fabrication. I started by using Claude to summarize a podcast and provide a list of salient points, including the potential counterargument. What I didn't expect was for Claude to fabricate a list of imagined research and then summarize the fictitious research to conclude that it lended support for the counterargument. I took Claude's list of research and pasted it into ChatGPT with Bing to browse the real-time web to validate the sources. Using Claude and ChatGPT in combination worked pretty well, but overall this is a tale of caution. You have to be suspicious of research provided by AIs and know how to use each tool according to its strengths.
In Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality, Melissa and Chris Bruntlett describe how the Dutch achieved so much cycling success, and how other cities might do the same. The authors bring up a variety of techniques and approaches the Dutch have used, such as seamlessly integrating cycling with public transit, pursuing customized strategies based on each city's unique landscape and culture, taking an iterative approach to infrastructure, using tactical urbanism and prototyping, and more.
