October Technical Writing Digest
Boo! Scared? It’s Halloween technical writing digest and I have some treats for you — useful articles and posts to learn more about technical writing.
Dreadful Deadlines, Spooky Structures, and Other Fears of Tech Writers
There’s Halloween in the air. It’s a gut-wrenching (but at the same time fun) time, a high time to reflect upon the fears that technical writers face at their work.
Technical writing is both an exciting and challenging career. It can be difficult to work with all the different people and complex information. In this post, you’ll find the list of the most common dreads of tech writers.
2022 API Survey by Postman: Points of Interest
It’s the fourth survey made by Postman — the world’s leading API platform. The biggest-ever report was held within four weeks in June and July 2022. It contains the thoughts of more than 37,000 developers and API professionals on topics that include the economy, employment, remote work, the tools they use, and their views on the industry’s direction, combined with the data gathered on the Postman API platform. Read the Full State of the API report.
Postman is used by more than 20 million developers and 500,000 organizations for building and using APIs. It simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration, enabling users to create better APIs faster.
Comics as Documentation
Do you like comics? Here are some comics as documentation by Write the Docs that I found interesting:
2. Toward the broader globalization of Open Source: documenting your localization Journey
3. Improve Customer Adoption with UI Help
4. The Art of Asking Questions
5. Cultivating a Stakeholder Network for Our Docs: How Building Relationships Improves Our Content
6. Beyond spell checking — what else can we check automatically?
7. Documentation as Marketing? From Conflict to Collaboration
8. Maintaining Documentation: Make It Easy!
Applying Csikszentmihalyi’s psychology of flow to the writing of technical documentation
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s psychology of flow, which describes ways to be so engrossed in an activity that you lose track of time, can be applied to writing technical documentation. Some of the traits of flow covered here include balance, effortlessness, goals, feedback, and concentration.
How Startups Build Lean Developer Education Programs (Appsembler Webinar Summary)
Startups are notorious for being lean and capital efficient, which means they aren’t going to throw a huge budget and a lot of time at creating a developer education program. More established companies such as MongoDB and Snowflake have created great developer education programs, but what can startups do to compete with these heavyweights? How can they hack their way to creating educational initiatives for hard-to-reach audiences such as software developers and engineers?
This was the topic of a recent webinar hosted by Appsembler and Draft.dev. Nate Aune, CEO of Appsembler, and Karl Hughes, CEO of Draft.dev discussed how startups can build lean developer education programs. Read the key takeaways.
The challenges of replatforming content (podcast)
In episode 130 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Sarah O’Keefe talk about the challenges of replatforming content from one system to another.
