Sarah explains how she “orchestrates rather than writes” the documentation. She reviews the documentation in GitHub so that all of her reviews are tracked and can be fed back.
Some suggestions that she had for technical writers:
Learning how to a steer a module through skills, plugins, or customization layers.
Build your own style guide and then try to get the model to follow that guide.
Start tinkering.
I get surprised sometimes when I hear that a company that I follow for various reason has tech writers. And then, it would make total sense to me that as a technology company, they would have tech writers – if not in India then in some other part of the world.
I have been following Cory Doctrow since his days at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and when he was the Editor of Boing Boing. I stopped following him for a long time in between. I found him again when I followed him on Tumblr.
I love reading whodunnits and I liked reading this forensic whodunnit. The descriptions are crisp and just right in places. In other places, I had to work a lot to not jump to the paragraph where the action is. I enjoyed reading the technical explanations that he offers in the novel. But there are two paragraphs that I totally enjoyed reading. I absolutely enjoyed reading the technical explanations for the red and blue teams and on cyber security.
One, where he goes to buy a car and expresses his hatred for Elon Musk. He says:
From there, I maneuvered to this year’s car listings, checking the box for all- electric and unchecking the box for Teslas. I just don’t like the man. I’ve spent enough years around enough bullshitters that I can spot them a mile away. In his case, I could spot him from orbit, using one of his overpromised, underdelivered satellites.
Another, where he talks about technical writing:
So she became the company’s first tech writer, then its first documentation specialist, then, as her docs and organization of support requests produced solid sales leads and high customer satisfaction, she got a team.
After reading this book, I think I have turned back to reading fiction again.
I had a copy of the book, Zen and the Motorcycle Maintenance in my third year of engineering college. I picked it up probably because I was fascinated with Zen (still am) and Motorcycles (still am).
It had not stuck me when I became a technical writer in 2019 that the author of the book, Robert Pirsig had also been a technical writer at the time. I discovered this fact when Tom Johnson interviewed Dan Grabski about a talk that he gave at the Write the Docs conference.
Tom Johnson then read the book and began doingexperiments around some of the ideas from the book.
In a blog post in the series, Johnson wrote:
During the sixties, with the countercultural movement associated with hippies, there was a strong distrust that technology had introduced destructive and controlling capabilities, with dehumanizing war machines (in the context of Vietnam) and government surveillance, leading to manipulation and mass control. There was a Luddite sentiment toward technology. The post-countercultural movement sought to reconcile that attitude about technology with something more positive, embracing the more creative, connective, and liberating aspects of technology.
I think we are at a similar point again in history.
Looking at my writings from 2007 and 2013 (when I had picked up the book again, close to it’s fortieth anniversary), my takeaways from the book were more philosophical. But, these were not things that I could apply to my life practically.
Reading the works of Ryan Holiday, helps me understand the usefulness to look at how philosophy could help in our daily life. We also had a workshop on the practice of mindfulness and meditation at work that I think will help me do this. I may pick up this book again as my first read of 2024.