[Podcast] Your docs are your infrastructure

Everybody loves to hate Frequently Asked Questions, or FAQs. More often than not, technical writers pale and stagger at the sight of hefty, unsorted FAQ sections, as if they were beholding a writhing mass of primal chaos. Others value their pragmatic qualities: FAQs, they say, lower the bar to contribution and are good fuel for LLMs and search...

A reader asked me how they’d become a Documentation Engineer, because they saw I got hired as one and felt curious about what it takes to get there. This inevitably got me thinking about job titles and the evolution of tech writing, two topics that are quite central to this blog. Let me begin with the short answer: As a tech writer you’ll have to...

I’ve been using large language models (LLMs) for a while now. They accelerate and improve my output at work, to the point that losing access to them would make me feel slightly impaired in some areas. Rather than fearing WriterBot, I’m embracing the additional capabilities it grants. At the same time, I’m extremeley conscious of their...

I’ve recently started a new job as a documentation engineer. While my work is largely the same as that of a technical writer, the sound and semantics of my new job title gave me some pause and made me think about what it really means to be doing docs-as-code. To say that it’s about writing documentation using the same tools and methods as...

Some months ago I wrote a post about open source docs contributions. My dear colleague Scott Abel (The Content Wrangler) found that to be a good topic for a webinar, so today I hosted Contributing to Open Source Documentation Projects, where I expanded my thoughts on the topic and provided some practical guidance. You can also download the slides...