A technical communicator's travel blog about the impressive land of developer experience and the deep waters of API usability
So, this is it—the last post on this blog. As introduced in the beginning, this blog was part of a module in the MA programme I study at the University of Limerick. The blog accompanied me throughout the semester, and I used it to reflect on my learning as well as to cover technical communication… Continue reading Goodbye, blog
After nearly two years of studying the Technical Communication and E-Learning MA programme, the end is near. Although not close. There are still five months to go, and I will write my dissertation during that time. However, the current semester is about to terminate, and I will submit my last assignments for this programme within… Continue reading What I remember from and what changed through the MA programme
From a learner’s perspective, I can confirm that it is more than helpful to know what the criteria for grading an assignment are. This is why instructors should provide assignment briefs that make clear what the assignment is about and what exactly gets graded. It is also helpful to have instructors who are available to… Continue reading How offering a choice can motivate learners to push their limits
So, we have to put up an e-portfolio to show examples of the work we had done during the MA programme. It has been two years. I have changed computers in between. My data are … actually, I don’t know exactly, where all the data are. On some hard disks around here probably. Maybe I’ll… Continue reading Selecting artefacts for an e-portfolio
With my dissertation, I aim to provide a state-of-the-art set of answers to the overarching question of what would be best practices for API documentation. To find answers, I wanted to review the body of knowledge from technical communication as well as software documentation. I wanted to identify studies that could provide reliable answers. So,… Continue reading Finding the best research method to answer your research question(s)
MkDocs—“make documentation”. 🤖 The static site generator MkDocs builds HTML output (a website) from Markdown source files, which you edit in the text editor of your choice, like Notepad++, Atom, Sublime or others. The very convenient thing about MkDocs is: it renders the output while you edit. That is, whenever you hit “Save” for the… Continue reading MkDocs: Write in Markdown, get a website
Recently, tech writer Tom Johnson gave a webinar on trends in the field of API documentation, which I attended because this topic is relevant for my dissertation. Click here to access the slides and the recording of the webinar. The trends he found resulted from an online survey he conducted over the last two months.… Continue reading Trends in API documentation
It's time for the Git cheat sheet for writers! Read why General command structure: command -o --option argument "another argument, containing blank spaces" Note that Git commands always start with the prefix git whereas Unix commands do not carry a prefix. Unix commandDescriptionpwdPrint working directory = tell me which folder I am inlsList all items… Continue reading Git & Unix cheat sheet
Part 1: Why you need to learn Git for Docs as Code Docs as Code. What? In the software industry, technical writers work close to developers, especially when writing developer documentation, that is, documents that have other developers as target users. The idea of Docs as Code is to employ the same workflows for the… Continue reading How I learned Git, forgot it, and re-learned it
Educating students on how to conduct usability tests is part of the MA programme I currently study (click here to enlarge the module map shown above). The product I decided to test was a developer portal, that is, a website aimed at developers and offering further information about microservices and their APIs. When shaping the… Continue reading Usability (testing) for complex information systems
API docs and me 