writing | Just Write Click

August 22, 2008 by annegentle

How do people converse about technical topics today?

I have seen the eminent reinvention of technical documentation as we know it, which inspired me to begin chronicling my own observations and shifts in the field of communicating technical topics through conversation. One such revealing moment happened while I was working on documentation for the One Laptop Per Child project on their wiki at […]

August 20, 2008 by annegentle

How can we go towards documentation as conversation?

Tell me… and I will forget. Show me… and I will remember. Involve me… and I will understand. -Confucius Documentation as conversation means getting closer to the users and helping them perform well. Over the years experts such as JoAnn Hackos and Jared Spool have told us that this type of user-centered design and focus […]

August 15, 2008 by annegentle

Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) reading list

Here’s a reading list for DITA materials when you’re just getting started. I’ve been fielding some questions via email and IM about DITA lately, and pulled this blog post out of my drafts. I hope it’s helpful. Learning more about DITA http://justwriteclick.com/2006/05/18/learning-more-about-dita/ Getting started with DITA http://justwriteclick.com/2007/04/12/getting-started-with-dita/ Structured writing, structured documentation http://www.mbwest.com/Rants-and-raves.htm BMC Case Study […]

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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 […]