writing | Just Write Click

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 […]

July 26, 2008 by annegentle

BookSprint for Floss Manuals writing for the XO and Sugar

I’ve been busy lately working on plans for a Floss Manuals BookSprint. A BookSprint is a week-long concentrated effort of technical writers getting together to create a manual for free, libre open source software products. BookSprints are like a workshop where writers come together to learn how to write good user documentation. BookSprints are also […]

July 10, 2008 by annegentle

We’re not Amish, we just don’t have a TV

I grew up in Goshen, Indiana, a college town of about 20,000 people with many Amish and conservative Mennonites in the surrounding communities. Seeing horse-drawn buggies parked at the local Wal-marts (yes, there was one on each side of town) was not uncommon. I learned to love the simple quilt designs and homemade Dutch food, […]

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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 […]