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Working effectively with other teams as a technical writer
In this guide, I hope to inspire you by showing you how building relationship with team members in other roles (such as product management, UX, and customer support) can enrich your documentation work.
Attracting writers to OSS
In this blog entry, I share a presentation I gave about how to attract more technical writers to your open source project.
UX and technical writers: a powerful partnership
UX and technical writing teams can benefit from collaborating together at various stages in the software development lifecycle. Both UX and technical writing teams want to improve the customer experience and they both have different perspectives and strengths to offer.
Working as a technical writer in open source
As part of a work project, I created a comprehensive list of possible tasks that tech writers working in OSS might possibly work on. I also created a document explaining the unique challenges faced by writers working in OSS.
Where do docs live?
In this lightning talk, I argue that documentation thrives when it is in the same department as product. If that’s not feasible, documentation is at least improved by applying product management strategies.
Growing a healthy DevOps community inside Salt Project
This week I presented at SaltConf 21 about how Salt became such a successful open source project. Spoiler alert: the secret was all in its community management!
Bridging the docs gap
In this lightning talk that I gave for the October 2020 Salt docs jam, I describe a phenomenon I call the docs value-action gap. Then, I discuss strategies for bridging that gap in open source documentation.
The power of personas
Personas make it easy for technical writers to identify the audiences they are creating documentation for. Personas get me maybe 65-75% of the way there in terms of understanding my audience.
Creating effective community doc events (a case study)
The Salt project’s recent documentation jam was a huge success in terms of participation, productivity, diversity, and positive buzz. But why? In this blog entry, I break down the many elements that led to such a successful event.
The life-changing magic of a tidy kanban board
I’ve gone from actively hating our documentation issue backlog to feeling proud of our issue triage process. In this post, I share key insights and best practices that I’ve learned about issue triage.
Getting started in open source as a new tech writer
Contributing to open source projects gives you valuable work experience and helps you build your professional network. Read my advice about using open source to land your first technical writing job.
Attracting active contributors to open source (a case study)
Read my advice for attracting more active contributors to open source using lessons learned from the Good Docs Project.
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