Hi Reader, I've hired a lot of technical writers. Yes, I read your LinkedIn recommendations. Layoffs are everywhere right now, and they suck. Some of you got the surprise calendar invite this month, and some of you are still at your desks wondering who's next. Either way, the people who can vouch for your work are about to scatter. If you were laid off Ask for portfolio samples, and get the answer in writing. Yes, NDAs are a thing. Most of them come down to "do not share company material...
3 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, Grocery receipts keep getting longer while the bags get lighter, and "recession" is back in the news. So I went back about a hundred years to see what people actually did during the Great Depression, and which of those habits still hold up. Most of them do. My new video covers 20, including: The 7½-cent lunch Eleanor Roosevelt served at the White House. It was cheap, nutritious, and bad enough that guests started eating before they showed up. How Seattle neighbors in the 1930s...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, The way your mouse scrolls can help a website identify you. Every mouse moves the page a slightly different number of pixels per notch, and that number stays consistent for your device. Add your screen size, your browser, and a few network settings, and a site can pick you out of a crowd without you ever signing in. That's browser fingerprinting, and it's the subject of this week's episode of Technical Writing Uncensored. My guest is Seth Honda, an English and computer science...
9 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, What is the technical writer career path? The honest answer is that there isn't one. There's the tidy ladder you see in blog posts, and then there's reality, which is messier, weirder, and full of people who fell into this field sideways. On paper, the ladder goes junior technical writer, technical writer, senior technical writer. Then it forks. One branch goes deeper as an individual contributor, to staff and principal. The other goes into management. It's clean and logical, and...
11 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, A few good writing samples used to be enough to get hired. Now hiring managers want to see that we can work in Git, publish docs as code, and use LLMs well. Most of our best work sits behind an NDA, though, so we can't just send a link. Gale James solved that by building her own proof. On this week's episode of Technical Writing Uncensored, she walked me through 3 projects she built on her own time: BookHub API docs, a sample API documentation site on Mintlify's free version,...
16 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, William Imoh, CEO of Hackmamba and all-around insightful person, published a post this week that I keep coming back to. You can read William Imoh's post about original content on LinkedIn, but here's the part that stuck with me: “ AI can help turn that information into content, but someone still has to create the information in the first place. — William Imoh For those of us who write documentation, that someone is us. We're the keepers of the source of truth for our products, and...
17 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, Before I started this portfolio-with-a-pipeline project, I didn't know that pinning a version was something anyone needed to do. Now, I know it's one of the things keeping my pipeline from breaking when a software version updates. Two failure emails The other morning I got a couple of emails saying that two of my scheduled tests had failed. As one does, I asked my robot minion (Claude Code) to find out why. Neither test had actually run. Every workflow in my repo runs on a...
19 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, Quick note, I have a sponsor! Check out the link at the bottom to get some free stuff and consider signing up for their newsletter. We can't be too well-informed, after all! And no, on to your regularly scheduled article. A senior technical writer posted on LinkedIn recently that she had been told her product does not need documentation for mass adoption. The reasoning came in four parts: a good enough product explains itself, people will find it and figure it out, mass adoption...
20 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, I recently wrote about how "technical" depends on who you're comparing yourself to. Around the same time, someone told me they were worried about publishing something too simple, because other writers might read it and decide they didn't know much. I understand the worry, but it pictures the wrong reader. When you're afraid of looking basic, you're imagining the most experienced person who might see your work. That person already knows the answer and isn't looking for it. The...
24 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, A friend of mine built a plugin for No Man's Sky, and he offered to let me try it. Before he sent it over, he asked how technical I was, because he needed to decide whether to package it as a .exe or let me handle the install myself. I told him I'd probably just ask Claude Code to install it, because I don't consider myself as technical as an engineer. He said, "Oh, if you can use Claude Code, you're better than most." That surprised me. I don't think handing a task to an AI tool...
26 days ago • 2 min read