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.
This tutorial shows you how to build your own balance board with both single and double rollers, intended for standing intermittently at a standing desk. If you browse balance boards online, you'll find they're expensive for how simple they are: a piece of wood on a roller. Buying all the materials yourself will likely equal the cost of pre-built board, but your custom board will probably be better and you can make multiple balance boards (one for work, one for home). Plus, you can create a balance board with a double roller, or innovate in other ways.
After 2.5 years of avoiding it, I finally got Covid, probably Omicron based on the symptoms. I usually don't write about personal illness, but I also figure that my blog would have a void if I never wrote about Covid during the entire pandemic.
In a technology world growing increasingly specialized, technical writers can stay relevant by leveraging their most salient skill: the ability to see the big picture, to look across systems or individual APIs and see the shape of the whole. Technical writers can employ big-picture thinking with docs by emphasizing the following content types: (1) Detailed product overviews, (2) developer journeys, (3) cross-system workflows, (4) integrated API data, (5) and external domain knowledge.
