I sometimes lurk on /r/technicalwriting to gauge the interests and sentiments of the community. What I’ve noticed over the years is that pessimism and anxiety have always been quite high; Reddit, it seems, can be a powerful outlet for all sorts of feelings. Here I’d like to analyze and address some of the challenging ones. If you had similar thoughts, I hope my words will prove useful.| passo.uno
I’ve been noticing a trend among developers that use AI: they are increasingly writing and structuring docs in context folders so that the AI powered tools they use can build solutions autonomously and with greater accuracy. They now strive to understand information architecture, semantic tagging, docs markup. All of a sudden they’ve discovered docs, so they write more than they code. Because AI must RTFM now.| passo.uno
I’ve been writing documentation and technical articles for more than a decade now. One piece of feedback I consistently got from managers and peers during all these years is how fast I am when producing and releasing docs. For example, I was once asked to document a new feature from a team I wasn’t serving two weeks ahead of launch. Everything was new to me, but I had most of the docs drafted after four days. By launch, the docs had been deemed ready to go live.| passo.uno
We all want to do a good job. Some of us also want to get better at our craft for a number of reasons, either practical or slightly delusional. Those include getting a raise, strengthening our résume, or simply ending the day with a fragile feeling of satisfaction after surviving failure for the nth time. They’re all good goals, though the ways of achieving them are not always straightforward. Moreover, the path to career growth is riddled with self-doubt and impostor syndrome.| passo.uno