#WritersCoffeeClub
How do you select ideas from all the ones floating around?
My stories usually come when some person, or an image of them, an action they're doing, a location they're in, etc, gets stuck in my head. Usually there's a strong emotional feel attached. My new book, for instance, started when I was dozing away one morning and in my head a woman woke up next to a dead body and said, "Oh, no. Not again." That made me sit up.
#TechnicalWriting#SoftwareDocumentation#SoftwareDevelpopment: "With few books on technical writing, and even fewer trying to push tech writing into the minds of other professionals, TWfSD is an excellent, necessary book that capably bridges the gap between engineering and tech comms by directly addressing our partners in crime, software developers. I think both Chris and I would agree on making technical documentation a mandatory subject for Computer Science degrees, alongside modern DevOps and PMO techniques. This book could be the basis of a “Documentation 101” course in the syllabus of any modern CS degree (and I’d certainly pay to see Chris as the instructor)."
“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.”
Octavia Butler #writing#writingcommunity
#TechnicalWriting#SoftwareDocumentation#Markdown#XML#DITA: "Think about how in Markdown you would ensure that “all our how-to guides must have an h1 title, followed by one or more paragraphs, followed by one or more steps to achieve the guide’s goal”, and then consider how easy it is in DITA.
This is just not really possible today, at least in any popular Markdown-based framework.
There is a path
Bridging the gap between Markdown and structured authoring will require building new tooling and standards. It’s unlikely that CommonMark or any other popular Markdown flavor would consider going in this direction, so we’ll have to create tools around Markdown.
We at Doctave have some ideas about how to achieve this, and have a roadmap on how to get there. At a high level there are a few things we would need:
✅ A parser and template system that is Markdown-aware
❌ A language for describing constraints and rules for your Markdown content
❌ An engine that enforces those rules on your content
We’re already part of the way there!"
Just getting the day going here on the East Coast of the USA. I’m tired, have a headache, and have to teach #writing in about 3 hours. But I’m also awake, have something to type on, and have this guy to keep me company. So, it’s all good. #catsofmastodon#cats