Skill #11: Surviving in the Dev World

10/01/18 • 36 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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We all know that successful technical writers are more than writers: they’re designers; they’re knowledge managers; they’re support. However, for technical writers in the dev world, they’re expected to gain new skills, particularly, understanding (and writing) programming languages.

That’s a challenging next step for technical writers – and understandably so: We can create docs, but introducing programming languages can make technical writers wonder what it really takes to survive in the dev world.

In this episode, I chat with Michal Skowron and Pawel Kowaluk – technical writers at Guidewire Software in Kraków, Poland – about how you can survive in the dev world, including:

the technical writers’ role in a development company
how technical writers can gain trust and respect from developers
how technical writers can start learning programming languages

Show Notes:

In this episode, I chat with Michal Skowron and Pawel Kowaluk – technical writers at Guidewire Software in Kraków, Poland – about how you can survive in the dev world, including:

the technical writers’ role in a development company
how technical writers can gain trust and respect from developers
how technical writers can start learning programming languages

Show Notes:

Previous Episode

Best of 2016

2016 was a lovely year for The Not-Boring Tech Writer podcast. We had 10 episodes with 11 guests, covering a variety of topics that truly captured the theme of the podcast: how technical writers can break the stereotype that technical writing is a boring career.

This episode includes my favorite segment from each of the 10 episodes. So if you hear a segment that interests you and haven’t dove into its episode – now is your chance.

Thank you, listeners, for supporting The Not-Boring Tech Writer, and I look forward to bringing you more episodes in 2017.

Show Notes:

Next Episode

Skill #12: Teaching Technical Writing

The technical writer has a variety of valuable skills – such as making documents enjoyable to read and complex topics easy to understand – however, the skill that I think is most valuable for the technical writer is the desire to stay relevant and advance their career.

So we pick up a programming language; we get continued education; we dig into API documentation, hopefully through Tom Johnson’s course on his site, I’d rather be writing.

But there’s another way to advance our career in technical writing – one that many of you in industry have perhaps never considered: teaching technical writing.

Jobs in teaching technical writing are rising – a great opportunity for the new and seasoned technical writer alike to make a career shift – and in this episode, our guest, Kim Campbell, professor and chair of Technical Communication at the University of North Texas, will tell you how to make it happen, including: