So many things are like that. Trying to bolt on accessibility or security as an afterthought never work as well as making those things part of the initial design.
I've been at this long enough that yes I know that just getting something out the door so we can make money is important.
But this just creates another kind of technical debt that comes back to bite you.
WordStar was great once you had the keycombos memorized.
WordPerfect was great for doing lots of formatting it was so easy to make a signature for printing a booklet or zine.
I've been using Scrivener as my creating space. It is great at taking down words and organizing research. It just does RTF which is completely fine for my needs, but it is not a word processor or page layout program but that is not what it needs to do.
I'd rather use Word (ugh) or InDesign for layout. Separating the data from the display keeps things focused on what's important at the time.
You can't look at the total acreage of the state as a metric when 64.4% of the state is owned by the federal government.
The proposed site is twice the size of Manhattan, NY and sized for 9GW of energy which is more than the entire state uses yearly. We literally do not have the water to support a data center that huge.
They just enacted a fireworks ban because the weather people just had to create a whole new category for how dry and dangerous it is. Air quality is a constant problem because all the pollution from regions West of Utah collect right against the mountains. A few years ago we woke up to what looked like heavy fog, but it was smoke --from Siberia.
Wasn't there a case of a F-150 running over a Lamborghini in a parking lot a few weeks ago, because the driver of the pickup couldn't see the supercar?
But, but, they're digital natives, oh course they know all about computers. /s
I get that. I used to be able to overhaul a VW beetle on the side of the road with regular tools. A couple of years ago my car's transmission's computer went out on the interstate. I couldn't even get a useful error code. The shop down the street didn't have a high enough end device to talk to it. While the dealer was able to figure it out; it took nearly a month to get the replacement part. I'm car semi-literate.
For one company, I made documentation for archive and backup software and I worked closely with tech support. Most customers were sysadmins, and a small subset had no clue what they were doing and they would call us for every little thing even remotely connected to our software. One was a case of an image in a spam email wasn't able to be archived and they were freaking out about the error.
I also worked at a university and that was concerning because some students would just give up whenever anything didn't go right the first time. No troubleshooting skills at all. We were moving from Google to MS and they needed to use Takeout to backup their stuff locally, just in case something happened. But we got a lot of calls because it wasn't ready to download immediately. I've heard it's gotten worse.
I never try to speak to everyone as a tech writer. Tutorials are for people who'd never used our software before, but even then I could assume a certain level of computer literacy, for example they can launch out software or browse to a URL.
I can make How-to's that can assume they had gone through at least one of the tutorials, but even then I put links to the appropriate tutorials so they could refresh or learn if they needed it.
But lately it seems like people are getting more computer illiterate. So how low do you go? I am getting tempted to add a link to some basic computer literacy.
It's kinda like people complaining about Space Launch System, why aren't we using Saturn V or an improved version of it. We have the blueprints and schematics and everything but it appears there's a gap between what's written down there and what's in the textbooks. A lot of in-between experience has evaporated because shop classes and manufacturing were shut down.
I am realizing that a lot of experience was never written down and turned into institutional knowledge that could be used later. The AI companies would love this but it's gone because it was more cost-effective not to.
Authenticity basically revolves around waves of immigrants. The authentic food comes from the time and place the immigrants came from. 20 years later things have changed. Food prices in both places have changed and so the cuisines split. Then another wave comes and the food is all new.
Some people looking for ways to extract wealth through the school system. There are always cuts at the classroom level but more money than ever at the admin level.
Some people are actively trying to sabotage the school system because the uneducated are easy to manipulate.
Any effort to change schooling needs to take those things into account.
After 12 years of trying, my manager has finally convinced the boss that dev docs and user docs are different, because Claude made different documentation for different audiences.
When I was in tech support I wrote down the solutions to tickets, it took training the other support techs to read the knowledge base. It took 6 months but support call duration dropped 40%.
It also took training to get customers to read the knowledge base. That reduced calls by 60%.
Documentation has been disregarded by management since the 70s. Now suddenly it's important and its costing them a lot to try to play catchup.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.