Events, articles, videos are here, in my new technical writing digest.
Comics as Documentation
Technical writing is not only about boring text. Some technical writers manage to create a user manual in the comics form. If you think that it’s difficult and even impossible, have a look at the following examples.
Everybody Lies in User Documentation
When a customer opens a user manual, the idea that the text is lying or it is trying to manipulate them will hardly ever cross their mind. Who would want to lie in technical documentation and why?
The grim statement proclaiming that everybody lies proves to be true yet again. Here’s what technical writers lie about.
API THE DOCS
It was a two-day conference about API documentation and developer portals.
Here are some discussed topics:
- Lorna Jane Mitchell: GitHub as a Landing Page
- Aaron Verber: Leaping Forward: Finding the Future of Your API Docs
- Sven Strack: Engineer Stunning (API) Documentation
- Jaap Brasser: Advancing Your API Strategy in an Infrastucture World
- Anthony Roux: What Makes an API Product Successful
If you missed the conference, you can find videos of presentations and slides here.
Long-term strategies for project productivity
One strategy for maintaining productivity when working on multiple projects is to try to complete one main task on each project each day. Tom Johnson has an illustration with arrows and blocks that helps keep him on track and aligns his focus in the long-term.
R Markdown
The rmarkdown package helps you create dynamic analysis documents that combine code, rendered output (such as figures), and prose. You bring your data, code, and ideas, and R Markdown renders your content into a polished document that can be used to:
The rmarkddown hex sticker
- Do data science interactively within the RStudio IDE,
- Reproduce your analyses,
- Collaborate and share code with others, and
- Communicate your results with others.
R Markdown documents can be rendered to many output formats including HTML documents, PDFs, Word files, slideshows, and more, allowing you to focus on the content while R Markdown takes care of your presentation.
R Markdown supports dozens of static and dynamic output formats including HTML, PDF, MS Word, Beamer, HTML5 slides, Tufte-style handouts, books, dashboards, shiny applications, scientific articles, websites, and more.
Write the Docs meetup — Stockholm
The topics of the meetup were the following:
- Recap of WTD Prague 2019
- How we are solving internal technical communication at Spotify
- Docs as Code @Peltarion
- Docs for Open Source — Grafana
The videos are gathered here.
Cybersecurity Style Guide
This guide is designed for security researchers. It provides advice on which terms to use in reports, how they should look in the middle of a sentence, and how to pronounce them out loud. Since the terms are listed alphabetically, you’ll find serious usage advice right next to playful entries about internet culture. More info is here.
SOURCE: https://medium.com/technical-writing-is-easy/technical-writing-digest-bd919472635b
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Technical Writing is Easy