Working with Engineers | When bad screenshots happen to good writers
Details
Meet and Greet (5-10 mins)
Given this is our first event, I'd like to have an informal meet and greet session for the first 5-10 minutes.
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Presentation: Working with Engineers (20-25 mins)
How does a technical writer build a super-productive relationship with an engineering team? Sarah has some tips gleaned from working with engineering teams at Atlassian and Google. The tips range from co-location (a fancy word for sitting together) to capitalising on your core skills as technical writer (a sure-fire way of becoming a valued member of the team), and more.
Are engineers keen to update the documentation themselves, and what might prevent them from doing so? See what some engineers replied to these questions.
We’ll close with a group discussion where people can share their own ideas and experiences.
Bio
Sarah Maddox is a technical writer on the Google Maps APIs, based in the Google Sydney offices. She strives for docs that are low in fat, high in fibre and not devoid of sugar.
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Presentation: When bad screenshots happen to good writers (15 mins)
You have your writing moving at a swift pace, your documents are getting reviewed in a timely fashion (surprise!) and you are nicely heading towards your release milestone. The only thing missing are some key screenshots that you need to put in before you publish your documentation. These key screenshots have come about because an urgent feature request has gone in the software development at the very last minute and the powers to be have deemed it crucial for this release.
In a moment of weakness and to help turn around the documentation quickly, you get someone else (testers, developers etc) to provide you these screenshots.
What you get instead are some hideous images posing as screenshots, that were captured randomly, bears no resemblance to your instructions and would make no sense whatsoever to the end user.
We know how this usually pans out.
This talk is about when bad screenshots happen to good writers.
Bio
Swapnil Ogale is a freelance/contract technical writer and is currently creating work instructions and guides for operations teams at NBN Australia. Online documents are his kind of thing. He is also the organiser of the Melbourne Flare User Group.