Now that I’ve said farewell to Google, you might be wondering where I’ll be posting my news. I have a few blogs, each devoted to a different topic: This blog (ffeathers) is all about writing and communication. I’ll post articles with words: things that amuse me, how to use various gadgets (after all, I’m a tech writer!), fiction (when Trilby Trench makes another appearance, for example), and about communication in general. Birds In Sydney is about birds. The birds in Australia are smart, beautiful, weird. Wherever I venture, the birds are there too. I can’t not write about them. Travelli ..read more

After 10+ wonderful years at Google, I’ve decided to move on. My last day at Google was yesterday, April 10th. My first Google gig was the docs for the Maps APIs. Next came Cloud AI and an open source machine learning platform called Kubeflow. Three+ years ago, I joined an internal Developer Relations team to work on docs for internal platforms and frameworks. Over all my time at Google, the achievement I’m most proud of is Google Season of Docs. Season of Docs is a program that engages technical writers around the world to work for a period of time on various open source projects (similar to ..read more

This post is a quick update on the wonderful, interesting, in-person Write the Docs Australia 2023 conference, which took place in early December. The recordings of all the presentations are now on YouTube. The photos are on Flickr. There’s more about the conference and my presentation in my earlier blog post. I was one of the presenters at the conference, speaking about Understanding AI and helping it understand you. Here’s the recording of my presentation: Thank you again to the Write the Docs Australia team for a great event. It was wonderful seeing people in person!  ..read more

This week I was delighted to attend Write the Docs Australia 2023. The topic of my presentation was: Understanding AI and helping it understand you You could say that’s ambitious. An attempt to explain machine learning, artificial intelligence, and large language models in 30 minutes! There’s a lot of speculation at the moment about how AI might change our lives, our roles, and our jobs. Instead of adding to the speculation, I want to share some practical knowledge that technical writers can apply when thinking about AI and its impact on the world of technical documentation. The presentatio ..read more

I recently came across the indoition web site, which has plenty of useful information related to technical writing. In particular, the site offers a comprehensive list of tools and websites. I like the fact that there’s a section offering decision aids for choosing a tool. Marc Achtelig, a technical writer and the creator of the site, also offers some interesting helper tools. One is a set of scripts that he’s created for the open-source AutoHotkey tool. Using these scripts, you can configure keyboard shortcuts to auto-enter phrases, fix typos, and so on. Another useful offering is the set of ..read more

During most of my career as a technical writer, I’ve written and managed documentation for external users — that is, users who’re not part of the same organisation as I am. Sometimes this type of documentation is called customer-facing docs. I’ve also worked on open-source docs for a couple of years. And now I’m working on internal documentation — that is, docs for people working within the same organization (in this case, Google). For most of my tech writing career, the audience has been developers (software engineers), whether they be external or internal. What’s it like working on internal ..read more

Today I was chatting with ChatGPT, and asked it to tell me some jokes. Here’s an extract: Sarah: How about a joke involving an AI, a tech writer, and a duck. ChatGPT: Okay, here’s one for you: An AI, a tech writer, and a duck walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, “What is this, a joke?” The tech writer responds, “No, it’s a quack-umentation project!” Sarah: LOL ChatGPT: Glad you liked it! Let me know if there’s anything else I can help with. Sarah: Wait, but the AI wasn’t involved in that last joke! ChatGPT:You’re right! Let me revise that joke to include the AI: An AI, a tech writ ..read more

What does a technical lead (TL) do in a technical writing team? How does the role of a TL differ from that of a manager, or from that of another technical writer? In this blog post, I hope to answer those questions and to start a discussion where others can add their thoughts too. I’ve been TL of a technical writing team for a couple of years. In fact, my current team includes people working in several roles: technical writers, developer relations engineers, instructional designers, and program managers. In the past, I’ve also been TL of a team that consisted solely of technical writers. The T ..read more

I’ve been examining several articles about the financial impact of good or bad communication. Mistakes in documentation cost money, and there’s some good evidence of that point. In addition to the cases that involve documentation, I’m also interested in communication in a wider sense. Here’s what I’ve found so far: Workplace communication statistics (2021) in the Pumble Knowledge Library. This is a comprehensive article with a long list of references at the end. The Cost of Poor Communications, a Holmes Report by David Grossman on Provoke Media. Thank you to Kit Brown-Hoekstra of Comgenesis ..read more

I’ve been doing quite a bit of teaching and mentoring lately. Those teaching and mentoring experiences have led me to think about what I know without even realizing that I know it. At a deep-seated, subconscious level, I’ve forgotten that I once didn’t know certain stuff. I’ve also been thinking about the effect of that very forgetting on the people I’m teaching or mentoring. And the effect of that forgetting on myself and on my own confidence levels.  During all this thinking, it occurred to me that there’s a link between two often-discussed phenomena: the curse of knowledge and imposter ..read more