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.
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.
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
Introduction to technical writing -- slides and audio 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.