future | Just Write Click

October 11, 2011 by annegentle

Docs in 2031

I like to think about the future of documentation, ruminating on future processes, interactions, and tools. Yet this past week at the OpenStack Conference I was faced with the reality of the future of documentation as a storage device for knowledge. A long-term storage device, as in, 20 years from now, people (scientists, to be […]

April 23, 2011 by annegentle

Playing with the Future of Technical Communication

I have a great group of mom friends who also happen to be technical communicators. One day last month, my friend posted this picture her 6-year-old daughter made and asked if technical writing is genetic. Ha! Her mom says, “These are her first 12 steps of 20 that show how to make a Play-Doh apatosaurus.” […]

February 17, 2010 by annegentle

Workin’ on a Content Farm

I finally did it, I wrote my first article for the Demand Studios content farm site, eHow. I wasn’t playing the part of a content farmer, though, but rather a farm worker, writing an article for little pay (compared to other rates I have earned as a professional writer). I signed up for Demand Studios […]

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 […]