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April 14, 2013 by annegentle

How It’s Made: the OpenStack API Reference Page

Glad you asked! The site at http://api.openstack.org is a collection of HTML pages, and one page has an especially interesting story about how it is built. The http://api.openstack.org/api-ref.html page provides a listing of all the API calls for all OpenStack APIs that contribute docs to the page. Currently the only API that is still a […]

April 8, 2013 by annegentle

Developers, Writers, and First Jobs

I constantly try to network locally with Austinites, and I’m meeting more tech writers with diverse backgrounds. One of Austin’s slogans is “Keep Austin Weird” and while our writers aren’t necessarily weird, their backgrounds can be! For example, I know of one award-winning novelist in Austin who writes manuals during the day and novels at […]

October 12, 2012 by annegentle

Tools and skills in the red

If this isn’t a snapshot of our industry, I don’t know what is. A couple of observations: “Documentations” [sic] to me indicates an English-second-language speaker. Members listing that term as a skill is 245K, larger than the 107K “Technical Documentation”. Looks like it’s an easy popularity contest winner for “Technical Documentation” over “Technical Communication” with […]

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I’ve been thinking a lot about developer support at Cisco recently, especially for the way the world works today with multiple cloud providers. This post is a re-publish of my talk from over five years ago, but the techniques and tools for listening and helping others are still true today. At Rackspace, we watched several […]

Cisco DevNet is our developer program for outreach, education, and tools for developers at Cisco. From the beginning, the team has had a vision for how to run a developer program. Customers are first, and the team implements what Cisco customers need for automation, configuration, and deployment of our various offerings. Plus, the DevNet team […]

I had a great talk with Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf Technical Writing consulting last week. Here are the show notes, full of links to all the topics we covered. Podcasts are great fun to listen to and participate in, if a bit nerve-wracking to think on your feet and make sure you answer questions succinctly […]

At the beginning of this year, I worked hard to summarize my thoughts on API documentation, continuous publishing, and technical accuracy for developer documentation. The result is an article on InfoQ.com, edited by Deepak Nadig, who also was forward-thinking in having me speak to a few teams at Intuit about API documentation coupled with code. Always […]