The thing that drives me the most nuts is when it is just that one ad, shown over, and over and over again, sometimes twice in a row, which just makes me note to never, ever buy from them ever.
Though I did notice last week lots of unique ads for a while. They were wildly inappropriate to me. It was actually funny to get ads for wheat seed by the ton (I don't live in a wheat compatible location), followed by private plane time-share(don't travel that much). How those are supposed to go together stump me.
I help run a writer's symposium. We get about 200 presenters and 1200 attendees a year. No one's journey is the same. What worked for one; failed for another. You have to find what works for you. Writer's rules are more like tools, and try use the appropriate tool for the job.
Some things that I have learned from of them:
Write for yourself first and get to the end. Rewrite to add in all those things you didn't put in the right place the first time.
Speak at least the dialogue out loud. Spread the description around.
Read some of the worst to remind you that even they got published. Copy the greats for practice on dialogue, or description or whatever you want to work on as deliberate practice.
Try different things like write your story as a game, or a puppet play, or stage play, or screenplay, or radio play. Draw a storyboard or animatic. Go to the park and write what you see. Have your characters in a room together and eat a pie.
An option is to signup to a journalism school writing course done remotely and to follow at your own pace at set exercises with guidance from an assigned tutor. You'll sample more of the writing trade landscape than DIY and with luck discover your unique voice.
Are you an extrovert or introvert? Look at how you spend your time. Do you have to spend time with people or have to be alone sometimes?
What do you do when you have nothing else to do? I know that's really hard these days with all the distractions we have. So maybe what do you watch or read about? What are your interests?
But the world changes. I started out as an engineer and that got shipped to China. I pivoted to IT, shipped to India. Pivoted to technical writing and now there's LLMs.
I figure things out and share to make it easier for others too. That works in a lot of industries.
Due to personal and professional reasons I've spent too much time alone last years. I really noticed that I love being with people and that I cannot stand being all day in front of a computer by myself. I also read a lot about history, economy, culture and geography, but on the contrary my background is in Physics and I am finishing a PhD in NLP in which I don't feel very good.
Just started working on a book to celebrate the 50th year of our symposium, which is coming up in 5 years. The initial idea is a how-to book, filled with essays from past contributors, but since we only started yesterday - that may change.
My manager just told me that after 12 years of trying to get one of the founders to understand the difference between dev docs and user docs, they tried getting Claude to do it and he finally got it that they are different. He'd been saying this whole time that customer could just read the dev docs. If they could they wouldn't need our software.
How firm is the boundary between a dev doc and a user doc in your opinion? I have found that the overlap can be quite large if the users are also technically proficient. Right now I'm trying to balance "how X works so you can use the app better" with "how X works so you can contribute or build your own plugin". DeepWiki really helps as a backstop for anything not already covered though it's not without its own caveats of course.
Not OP but I think you have the right intuition in making a difference between using the app / contribute to the app. You may want to read https://diataxis.fr/ which elaborate on this idea and add another dimension (action / cognition) to this.
In general, I am talking about non-technical or technical in a different field.
In my case right now, our users are civil engineers, they just want to be able to use our software to model the environment. They really don't want to become an expert programmer on top of that.
They just want to be able to build their thing, like a bridge, so they can make money, and plug numbers into our software to do that.
It's like making a hammer, the documentation needed for forging a hammer out of steel will be radically different from using the hammer to build a house or doing ortho surgery.
I see variations on this too. It's fascinating that there is a class of people who were uninterested in expressive, natural language communication when it was only a way to speak to other people, but who are now super interested in it because it is a way to speak to machines. I worry about the wellbeing of these people -- they seem like prime candidates to slide into AI-induced psychosis.
Location: Orem, Utah
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Technical Writing, Information Development, User Experience/User Interface (UX/UI), Electronics Engineering, Computer Engineering
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephan-fassmann/
Email: stephan /dot/ fassmann /at/ gmail /dot/ com
There are 2 kinds of documentation: how to make something and how to use something. They are very different.
When you are making something you need to document what it is supposed to do (because the code tells us what it does and bugs are when it does something incorrect). You also need to document why you decided to do it that way so when you go back in 6 months you can pick up more easily.
When you are making user docs you need to think like a user, mainly assuming they never used it before, and they just want to get that task done so they can do all the other tasks they have to do.
Documentation is customer facing because when docs work, customers learn to trust you.
I create documentation that builds trust and help customers use the product successfully. I reduced tech support calls by 60% and increased support website lists by 40%.
> There is nothing special about roman concrete compared to moderns concrete. Modern concrete is much better
Roman concrete is special because it is much more self-healing than modern concrete, and thus more durable.
However, that comes at the cost of being much less strong, set much slower and require rare ingredients. Roman concrete also doesn’t play nice with steel reinforcement.
I think you are incorrect. Compared to modern concrete, roman concrete was more poorly cured at the time of pouring. So when it began to weather and crack, un-cured concrete would mix with water and cure. Thus it was somewhat self healing.
Modern concrete is more uniform in mix, and thus it doesn't leave uncured portions.
We have modern architecture crumbling already less than 100 years after it has been built. I know engineering is about tradeoffs but we should also acknowledge that, as a society, we are so much used to put direct economic cost as the main and sometimes only metric.
You would be very unhappy if you had to live in a house as built 100 years ago. Back then electric lights were rare. even if you had them the wiring wasn't up to running modern life. my house is only 50 years old and it shows signs of the major remodel 30 years ago, and there are still a lot of things that a newer house would all do different that I sometimes miss.
I've lived in a 100 year old house and and in a brand new house, they both had issues. That also both had advantages too.
Oddly the older house had a better designed kitchen. Our lives change over time and our housing has to adjust to that too.
Yes, QA should exist, and should be managed by Operations.
I've been places where devs have no idea what the product-as a whole-does. They just work on the feature of the sprint and throw the code over the wall. Their testing consists of if: it compiled==it passed. They have no idea how to even start actually testing if it's not on the happy path.
I been in places where the code accomplished the spec, but in the most lazy way possible so it appeared to work but was useless outside of what the tests looked for.
I knew one QA guy that was amazing but was so overloaded because management kept hiring "cheap" QA that were actively making his life worse.
I'm a tech writer right now at a tech company and a dev just sent over an LLM generated "doc" that's referring to things that don't exist.
Neither management nor dev has learned anything from Therac-25. QA is hard.
When I was young I took a tour of an air traffic control center near New York. By the end I knew it was not for me. Everyone looked stressed. Things have gotten so much worse.
This guy was doing at least 3 people's jobs even before the first emergency occurred.
Then it was an inevitable cascade failure situation. It was never his fault.
Management failed here. If its stupid but it works, its not stupid, is the old saying, but the reality I've seen is its still stupid but you got lucky. -Maxim 43
Though I did notice last week lots of unique ads for a while. They were wildly inappropriate to me. It was actually funny to get ads for wheat seed by the ton (I don't live in a wheat compatible location), followed by private plane time-share(don't travel that much). How those are supposed to go together stump me.
reply