Three mini-posts

17May09

A few interesting tech pubs-related events for me this week:

• a terrific case study webinar on doing tech pubs within an Agile development model, hosted by CIDM and presented by Bill Gearhart and Mike Wethington
• a LinkedIn discussion I started on the topic of socializing technical content that fizzled, which was illuminating in its own way
• an article by Joel Spolsky on ReadWriteWeb here, which prompted me to visit Stack Overflow for the first time in awhile to see how the site is developing

Tech Pubs and Agile Development – Agile development is a big, hot, topic these days; and if you write for a young company, your development peers are probably wanting to use some form of Agile methodology.  If you work for an older, larger company, it’s only a matter of time before Agile pilot projects start spinning off.  If no one in your company is talking about Agile, you still owe it to yourself to learn about this methodology, and if you think it can work better than what you are doing now, you can even implement it independently within tech pubs and start evangelizing to development.  Imagine that.  I’ll devote an entire post to the webinar and the implications of Agile for tech pubs within the next few days.

LinkedIn Discussion; Do you socialize technical content? – I posted this because I read and contributed to a discussion in this same group about where tech writer jobs have gone. That discussion now has well over 120 comments, many of which made me cringe – there are too many tech writers stuck in a victim-hood mentality, willing to use a lot of energy venting and bemoaning their fate.  I wondered how the same population would respond to a suggestion that involves adapting to new environments, namely the popularity of social media, and exploring how that might impact their profession… That discussion has 11 comments, 1.5 are jokes, one misunderstands the question, and I think 4 are my responses…  Should I be discouraged?

Stack Overflow -  If you haven’t visited, do so.  Unless you are a developer, you won’t find much there to engage with (although I did stumble across a discussion of LaTex (!), which I hadn’t thought much about in years, and which I didn’t realize still has currency – have to look into why that is…).  Anyway, Stack Overflow is a programming question and answer site, and it’s working pretty well.  I think tech writers should look at it and think: ok, how can we build a channel like this into our doc site?  If you publish topic-oriented content to a web site, imagine a mini Stack Overflow that ties into your content, and that is owned and operated by Tech Pubs.  Yes, that means getting the resources to create and manage sophisticated web applications, and somebody will have to pay for it.  Tech pubs people should be talking together to help each other understand and meet these kinds of challenges, not expending energy on nostalgia for the past, resentment of the present, and fear of the future.

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