Tag: writing

• Assert your way to stronger technical writing (April 4, 2025)

  Make your subject-matter experts feel more invested in your work by giving them assertions to correct, long before your first draft.

• Ten years of Fogknife (December 31, 2024)

  An acknowledgment of this blog's tenth birthday, with some discussion of current tooling, and where I've been putting my writing-energy these days.

• The Book of Apshai—a personal exegesis (May 31, 2023)

  A tour through the chapters of a most unusual and personally formative computer game manual from 1985.

• Stuff I did (and stopped doing) in 2021 (January 3, 2022)

  My 2021 was less about accomplishment than revision. Most of it was good, and none of it was easy.

• I got a job (redux) (June 28, 2021)

  Today I join Google as a technical writer. This completes a process that began more than six months ago. Intense mid-winter interviews preceded many conversations with leaders of various writing teams within the gigantic company, all shepherded by heroically patient recruiters. (Thank you, Tyler!)

• I got a job (January 16, 2021)

  Under cover of my birthday, I indulge in some personal news. Later this month I will join Hydrolix, a tiny startup with a very specific database product, as a full-time technical writer. This fulfills the career pivot I began to ponder 18 months ago, and represents both my first new job as a New Yorker and my first salaried job in over 15 years.

• A new style guide for Perl documentation (January 3, 2021)

  One for the brag sheet :

• Filling in the blanks (October 20, 2020)

  Writing, puzzle-solving, and the benefits of daily diversion.

• A new guide about Bise (September 5, 2020)

  I’m pleased to announce a new guide to installing and using Bise, my simple log-analysis tool for measuring a website’s recurring readership. My thanks to Linode for lending me a platform to share this guide with a wider audience than my writing usually has — and I suppose I can enjoy some fun irony about that, given the subject matter.

• Regression therapy through computer-language documentation (April 19, 2020)

  I completed a small grant-project to revise some Perl documentation, and it had me confront my surly self from 20 years ago.

• I’m looking for tech-writing work (July 14, 2019)

  Twenty years after accepting my first job as a software engineer, I’d like to try picking up some technical-writing work. If I find that it agrees with me, I might well consider refocusing my career into writing full-time, making software development an activity I’d continue to pursue for my own benefit only.

• On unconsciously ripping off Lars von Trier (June 23, 2019)

  Imagine my surprise when I saw a scene from a game I wrote in 2010 appear in a movie I'd never watched before from 2009.