To move out of a stagnant career, immerse yourself in learning on your own. You can learn programming online, for example, or specialize in a knowledge domain or tools.
As a technical writer, your holistic understanding of the total customer journey allows you to extend beyond your doc-writing role to wear other hats with usability, quality assurance, product management, training, support, and more. But the more time you spend in these other roles, the less time you have to spend on documentation, which results in a weaker doc product.
People looking to break into technical writing are often looking for open source projects they can document in order to build their technical writing portfolio. Instead of looking for open source projects, check out linksv.com to find startups that might need help with documentation.
After testing your documentation, you should communicate the feedback with your project teams. As much as possible, try to communicate the information through issue tracking systems because this makes the information more permanent, visible, and actionable.
In this guest review about the latest version of Madcap Flare, Karen Rempel reviews an older post I wrote about Flare 7 years ago and re-evaluates the points I loved or hated with the new version of Flare in mind.
The past few years, I've allowed doc to be treated as an external product, separate from the software engineering code. In reality, doc would probably benefit tremendously from a more strict integration with the engineering code review cycles, with the review split between QA and product management.
Ed Marsh had me as a guest on episode 4 of his Content Content podcast, which is now available to listen to.
Writing good documentation requires you to set up a test environment and test all of your instructions -- testing the instructions yourself and against a user. Testing instructions can be time consuming and tricky, especially with developer documentation. It's hard to see past personal blind spots and assumptions. But testing instructions gives you access to insight that makes your documentation much more accurate and useful.
My blog is both faster and more stable with Jekyll on Github than it was with WordPress on Bluehost with MaxCDN.
About once a week I get the following three questions. It would be nice to see some more variety.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
