I am looking forward to running a meetup in #Melbourne next Thursday for technical writers and anyone involved in IT work. In it I will explore some fun activities that you can run with teams of engineers to help them improve their writing skills.
There's lego and games involved.
There is still space for you to come. We also would like to hear your ideas and experience in running activities to help people improve their writing skills.
This is your reminder that we're just over two weeks out from the talk proposal deadline for Write the Docs Atlantic, an online conference about documentation.
We're hiring a technical writer familiar with Python, Sphinx, @readthedocs
and hopefully also energy systems to help improve our #OpenData docs. It's contract work and the writer doesn't need to be in the US. Please share & boost!
The #writethedocs community has been discussing #docsascode a lot the past few days, and it pushed me to finally finish and publish a post I've been noodling on for months... docs as code is a broken promise 🙈
Delighted to be able to publicise a paper that was presented at the @ALTAnlp 2023 Workshop at the end of last year, co-authored with my #PhD supervisor, Associate Professor @eltwilliams, and written as part of my research at #ANU School of Cybernetics.
Titled "Right the docs: Characterising voice dataset documentation practices used in machine learning", it combines both exploratory interviews and documentation analysis to characterise how large voice datasets - e.g. #LibriSpeech, @mozilla's #CommonVoice, and several others, document their #metadata.
Unsurprisingly, it finds that the #dataset#documentation practices seen currently do not meet the needs of the #ML practitioners who use these datasets.
We show, once again, in the words of Nithya Sambasivan - "everyone wants to do the model work, but nobody wants to do the data work" ...
Reid, K., Williams, E.T., 2023. Right the docs: Characterising voice dataset documentation practices used in machine learning, in: Muresan, S., Chen, V., Casey, K., David, V., Nina, D., Koji, I., Erik, E., Stefan, U. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association. Association for Computational Linguistics, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 51–66.
We want to apply to the Google Season of Docs for #PUDL but have never worked with an outside technical writer before. Does anybody have someone to recommend? It's a #Python project focused on producing open data describing the US energy system.
Hey folks, this is your irregularly scheduled reminder that I'm on the job market. Looking for permanent or contract stuff in the developer docs space as a senior individual contributor or team lead. Live community. Love remote work. Laugh when I'm able to help other people build stuff.
Thanks to everyone who has already passed along links, made introductions or boosted my posts.
"as you build up a docs set, you should remember that you need to server users’ interests at different stages in their journeys. Ideally, all of the content you create should help a user understand the whole system and provide them the information they need when they need it."
Everyone is looking to me for API doc best practices and process. Validating, but also a little intimidating, like the teacher learning the content the night before to stay ahead of the API doc class while teaching seven other classes at the same time.
I'd appreciate y'all sharing any thoughts & references & resources, from theory to implementation.
#writethedocs Australia Q: How do you prove the value of docs? A: Switch the Docs platform off to demonstrate the value added by technical documentation LOL
For at least 10 years I've had a career goal of speaking at a conference.
I can't believe it's taken me this long to achieve this goal, but I've finally done it. 😊
It was an improvised 5-minute lightning talk about doing #DocsAsCode from scratch at a small company.
The audience seemed to respond well, some people talked about it with me afterwards, and I achieved my main goal of telling lots of clever knowledgeable people about the challenges I'm trying to address. Yay!
#WriteTheDocs Australia: We were excited by this very useful gift in our conference bags this morning. Documentations love documenting their own conference for later reference!
#WriteTheDocs Australia. I must explore the Hemmingway app to see how useful it is to help writers create more 'readable' sentences: https://hemingwayapp.com/
#WriteTheDocs Now we are learning about Simplified Technical English (STE) - such an important thing to learn about and to influence our writing of technical documents.