Recommended reading: The Oatmeal about Creativity
The Oatmeal’s ten year anniversary Creativity comic isn’t just for artists – pretty much anyone in tech can learn something valuable from it.
Category: Uncategorized
Recommended reading: limiting work in progress
Three articles about limiting work in progress so you can actually get things done: “How finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable” by Lucas F. Costa: “Despite the simple mathematics, when some managers see that work is taking longer to finish, they start more work hoping that starting tasks earlier causes them to finish […]
The reader’s needs, key takeaways and front loading
After years of grumpily editing old content, I’ve found that many writers – including myself – have a problem meeting the reader’s needs. The average reader needs a concrete outcome like following a process or learning a new concept. Usually, the overall structure of the content matches that need; technical writers have a sort of […]
Recommended reading: Readable English
Toggle between two versions of each paragraph to see what readable English looks like.
Knowledgebase Ninjas podcast
Gowri Ramkumar at Knowledgebase Ninjas gave me the opportunity to participate in my first ever podcast and talk about my experience in technical writing and the direction Unity Documentation is going. Listen to the episode on their website.
An opinion about not having opinions
“We have the power to hold no opinion about a thing and to not let it upset our state of mind—for things have no natural power to shape our judgments.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.52 I’m having my house renovated by a guy called Phil. Phil doesn’t want to turn the house into his vision of […]
The shower isn’t necessary
You know that moment in the shower when you suddenly get an excellent idea? That happens when your brain, working away quietly while you’re talking to yourself about what could possibly have compelled you to buy shower gel that smells like a food item, suddenly connects two dots. We say that things just clicked, or […]
Questions to ask about a candidate
Hiring’s hard, and the cost of getting it wrong can be fairly high. Sometimes new employees will do harm; often they just won’t do as much good as the candidates you didn’t hire. So here are three questions to ask about a candidate that may help you make the best hiring choice. Do they bring […]
Attention management for writers, part 1.2: Make your to do list work for you
By now, we’ve got a to do list app that we like. We’ve figured out the features that allow us to divide and conquer tasks – projects, tags, status flags, priorities, due dates. And that’s great for keeping things tidy, but we’re after more than that: we’re after peace of mind. One thing you can […]
Separate the user’s needs from the solution
In a conversation about your user’s needs, it’s natural to start throwing out solutions almost immediately. Someone brings up an aspect of the user’s needs, and someone knows how to answer that aspect. But suddenly, that one aspect is all you’re talking about. You’ve just blinkered your view of the user to whatever can be […]
Tested Writing 