Bridging the gap from “not technical enough” to “technical” with Janine Chan
02/20/25 • 56 min
📣 Special announcement: The Not-Boring Tech Writer team (Kate and Chad) will be at Write the Docs Portland in May. Thanks to KnowledgeOwl's sponsorship, they’ll be wearing KnowledgeOwl and The Not-Boring Tech Writer t-shirts and giving out The Not-Boring Tech Writer stickers. If you're attending WTD Portland this year, please say hi to Kate and Chad, let them know what you think of the show, and swing by the conference swag table to grab some free stickers so you can flaunt your not-boring tech writer status with the world!
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In this episode, I’m talking with Janine Chan, a technical writer and Write the Docs community moderator. We talk about how feeling “not technical enough” is as much about attitude and approach as it is about knowledge and ways you can bridge the gap to a more technical future.
Janine and I discuss the fact that there’s no defined/established set of skills or training to become a technical writer. This lovely flexibility can also lead to a lot of imposter syndrome or feeling like you’re “not technical enough.” But through continuous lifelong learning, changing your attitude or the story you tell yourself, asking for help, and letting go of perfectionism, you can transition to a more empowered, technical version of yourself.
Along the way we discuss the wonders of indoor plumbing, the fact that growing up to a be a tech writer isn’t typically on kids’ radar, our tendency to get curious when we’re frustrated about something, the importance of trying to answer a question before you seek help, how to be generous in requesting help, how generally awesome and generous with knowledge people are, how the experience of knowing little makes us more empathetic writers, and so so much more.
About Janine Chan
Janine is a technical writer based in Calgary, Canada. When she's not writing software documentation or shoehorning sociolinguistics into conversations, she's usually either outside, or hunkered down trying to make room in her lap for both a knitting project and her cat. (She recognizes that "not-boring" is a relative term.) You can find her on LinkedIn and the Write the Docs Slack, where her inboxes are always open for more tech writing chats! She promises she won't write in third person like she is now.
Resources discussed in this episode:
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Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team:
We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback:
Contact Kate Mueller:
Contact Janine:
Contact KnowledgeOwl:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky
.
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Transcript
Kate Mueller: [00:00:05] Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we explore topics and hear from other writers to help inspire us, deepen our skills and foster our distinctly not-boring tech writing community. Hi, I'm Kate Mueller. In today's episode, I talk with Janine Chan, a senior technical writer and a Write the Docs community moderator. We talk about that feeling of not being technical enough and ways to level up your technical skills so you can flip the narrative to, 'I'm a technical writer who just hasn't learned how to do this yet'. Hello my not-boring tech writers. I am so excited this week to be joined by a writer that I met kind of by happenstance. I gave a talk at one of the virtual Write the Docs Portlands a few years ago on Beating the Virginia Blues, and this woman happened to be my moderator for that session and ended up being amazing. She handled the other person who was doing Q and As audio networking with total aplomb. I can say she is both great under pressure and also not boring and a delightful human to...
📣 Special announcement: The Not-Boring Tech Writer team (Kate and Chad) will be at Write the Docs Portland in May. Thanks to KnowledgeOwl's sponsorship, they’ll be wearing KnowledgeOwl and The Not-Boring Tech Writer t-shirts and giving out The Not-Boring Tech Writer stickers. If you're attending WTD Portland this year, please say hi to Kate and Chad, let them know what you think of the show, and swing by the conference swag table to grab some free stickers so you can flaunt your not-boring tech writer status with the world!
_____________________________________________
In this episode, I’m talking with Janine Chan, a technical writer and Write the Docs community moderator. We talk about how feeling “not technical enough” is as much about attitude and approach as it is about knowledge and ways you can bridge the gap to a more technical future.
Janine and I discuss the fact that there’s no defined/established set of skills or training to become a technical writer. This lovely flexibility can also lead to a lot of imposter syndrome or feeling like you’re “not technical enough.” But through continuous lifelong learning, changing your attitude or the story you tell yourself, asking for help, and letting go of perfectionism, you can transition to a more empowered, technical version of yourself.
Along the way we discuss the wonders of indoor plumbing, the fact that growing up to a be a tech writer isn’t typically on kids’ radar, our tendency to get curious when we’re frustrated about something, the importance of trying to answer a question before you seek help, how to be generous in requesting help, how generally awesome and generous with knowledge people are, how the experience of knowing little makes us more empathetic writers, and so so much more.
About Janine Chan
Janine is a technical writer based in Calgary, Canada. When she's not writing software documentation or shoehorning sociolinguistics into conversations, she's usually either outside, or hunkered down trying to make room in her lap for both a knitting project and her cat. (She recognizes that "not-boring" is a relative term.) You can find her on LinkedIn and the Write the Docs Slack, where her inboxes are always open for more tech writing chats! She promises she won't write in third person like she is now.
Resources discussed in this episode:
—
Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team:
We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback:
Contact Kate Mueller:
Contact Janine:
Contact KnowledgeOwl:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky
.
—
Transcript
Kate Mueller: [00:00:05] Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we explore topics and hear from other writers to help inspire us, deepen our skills and foster our distinctly not-boring tech writing community. Hi, I'm Kate Mueller. In today's episode, I talk with Janine Chan, a senior technical writer and a Write the Docs community moderator. We talk about that feeling of not being technical enough and ways to level up your technical skills so you can flip the narrative to, 'I'm a technical writer who just hasn't learned how to do this yet'. Hello my not-boring tech writers. I am so excited this week to be joined by a writer that I met kind of by happenstance. I gave a talk at one of the virtual Write the Docs Portlands a few years ago on Beating the Virginia Blues, and this woman happened to be my moderator for that session and ended up being amazing. She handled the other person who was doing Q and As audio networking with total aplomb. I can say she is both great under pressure and also not boring and a delightful human to...
Previous Episode
Kate sounds off on content types
📣 Special announcement: The Not-Boring Tech Writer team (Kate and Chad) will be at Write the Docs Portland in May. Thanks to KnowledgeOwl's sponsorship, they’ll be wearing KnowledgeOwl and The Not-Boring Tech Writer t-shirts and giving out The Not-Boring Tech Writer stickers. If you're attending WTD Portland this year, please say hi to Kate and Chad, let them know what you think of the show, and swing by the conference swag table to grab some free stickers so you can flaunt your not-boring tech writer status with the world!
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My current in-flight projects include updating nearly all of our documentation to reflect major changes to our user interface, which includes changes to screenshots, navigation options, and section/subsection labels. I’m also working on my long slog to convert all our screenshots from .png to .webp format. As I make all of those updates, I’m bringing our content into line with our current style guide (the first time I’ve used an explicit style guide in the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base).
I recently finished teaching my first Knowledge Management Master Class with KnowledgeOwl. This was mostly a success, though it was a sharp learning curve for me and I’m already full of ideas on what to do differently next time. It also humbled me since it made me view my own docs through the lens of all the best practices I was suggesting people employ–and realizing how often my docs fell short.
For me, the most fascinating takeaway was really digging into the concept of concept types or information typing. I’ve never done this as an explicit, intentional exercise. After researching various approaches, I’m sold on the underlying concept. My plan is to create some templates for each major content type, using The Good Docs Project’s templates as a starting point). I’m then going to use those templates as I update content in our Features category to test and refine the templates before gradually applying them to the entire knowledge base. I’ll be using tags to track my progress and identify the content type for each page, too. In Episode 5, I’ll report back on how I’m doing in my endeavors!
Resources discussed in this episode:
- KnowledgeOwl Support KB
- Diátaxis content types for software documentation
- Dave Gash’s A Painless Introduction to Information Typing, which is a pretty solid introduction to Information Typing as it’s used in DITA and other frameworks
- The Good Docs Project
- Wisdom Wednesday on Use tags + Manage filters for fast docs updates/audits: Kate’s quick walkthrough on how she uses tags and Manage filters in KnowledgeOwl for content audits and updates
—
Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team:
We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback:
Contact Kate Mueller:
Contact KnowledgeOwl:
—
Transcript
Kate Mueller: [00:00:04] Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we explore topics and hear from other writers to help inspire us, deepen our skills and foster our distinctly not-boring tech writing community. Hello fellow not-boring tech writers. I'm Kate Mueller, and this is one of our solo episodes where I share things I'm thinking about or working on, or both. I'm recording this episode in early December, right after Assad's o...
Next Episode
Kate sounds off on docs hierarchy of needs and how we talk to ourselves
📣 Special announcement: The Not-Boring Tech Writer team (Kate and Chad) will be at Write the Docs Portland in May. Thanks to KnowledgeOwl's sponsorship, they’ll be wearing KnowledgeOwl and The Not-Boring Tech Writer t-shirts and giving out The Not-Boring Tech Writer stickers. If you're attending WTD Portland this year, please say hi to Kate and Chad, let them know what you think of the show, and swing by the conference swag table to grab some free stickers so you can flaunt your not-boring tech writer status with the world!
_____________________________________________
In this solo episode, Kate shares an update on working with content types, muses about the idea of a Documentation Hierarchy of Needs, and reflects more on Janine Chan’s interview (S3:E4) and how we talk to ourselves about being tech writers.
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I may have overcommitted myself in Episode 3. I have been incorporating content type work into my massive content audit, but after working on four of the nineteen Features subcategories, I realized it was taking too much time and I had to refocus on my main task of updating content to match our UI and navigation releases. However, I like the information architecture decisions this has helped me make and the clarity it’s bringing to the docs themselves and how I organize them, so it’s a project I intend to continue.
Making these kinds of priority decisions is something we all have to tackle all the time. But the content type work got me thinking: I’ve used an intuitive content type sense for a long time. I suspect I’m also using an intuitive decision-making framework for prioritizing my docs work. What would an explicit framework for that look like? In talking this over with a colleague, I realized I wanted a Documentation Hierarchy of Needs. I discovered that MongoDB created exactly this for their documentation overhaul once upon a time and wrote this blog post about it. I briefly run through their Hierarchy of Needs and how my decision to temporarily deprioritize content types might fit within it.
I also reflect more on Janine Chan’s episode (S3:E4) and her point about reframing the way we talk to ourselves from “I’m not technical enough” to “I don’t know how to do this... yet.” And I share my own suggestion for handling that narrative problem.
Resources discussed in this episode:
- KnowledgeOwl Support KB, Features category
- MongoDB blog post: Applying Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to Documentation
- TNBTW Episode 3 and Episode 4
—
Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team:
We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky
Contact Kate Mueller:
Contact KnowledgeOwl:
—
Transcript
Kate Mueller: [00:00:02] Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we explore topics and hear from other writers to help inspire us, deepen our skills and foster our distinctly not-boring tech writing community.
Kate Mueller: [00:00:18] Hello fellow not-boring tech writers! I'm Kate Mueller, and this is one of our solo episodes where I share things I'm thinking about or working on. I'm recording this episode at the very beginning of February, s...
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