I had a short list of applications across my Macs, iPhone, and iPad that I use every day to keep my work and personal projects on schedule and organized Unlike past years, my list has shrunk in size to some trusted favorites:
My go-to apps in 2018
Category / Collaboration
My SharePoint site pet peeves
The technical writer’s 5 best friends
Technical writers need to expand their personal and professional friends because they need to. Building a strong personal and professional network
1. The product manager
The product manager can be the technical writer’s best friend or worst enemy. Knowing a competent product manager can aid technical writers to better understand the product they are documenting.
On the dark side, when faced with incompetent product management, a technical writer with their grounding in writing product requirements and functional specifications can help be a voice of reason during the triage of ambiguous or plain technically unfeasible requirements.
2. The senior DBA/database architect
The whole world and many of today’s leading-edge web applications run on databases making a senior DBA and database architect a valuable friend indeed.
3, The storage area network engineer
Let’s face it all the business world’s data (and secrets) live on one SAN or another.
4, The financial controller
It never hurts to know the person who handles the money and processes the checks. This is true for employees not just freelancers and independent contractors.
5. The solution architect
Solution architects and network architects can be valuable friends of the technical writer because of their responsibilities over the design of solutions.
Who are your five best friends as a technical writer?
Photo by Drew Farwell on Unsplash
Building the better G Suite administrator
I’ve written about G Suite and other cloud productivity tools or a while now. Furthermore, I’ve had the chance to explore the intersection of Microsoft Office and G Suite for technical writing and user productivity.
G Suite can represent some significant cost savings for *some* organizations. It’s not going to happen by taking G Suite live and sending your enterprise users a URL. Outside of a solid implementation plan, the role of the G Suite Administrator plays a crucial role in the successful launch of G Suite.
An alternative perspective about taking meeting minutes
I was talking to a recruiter once who asked me how I felt about taking meeting minutes. The first thing I said was “I think meeting minutes are overrated because I’ve rarely if ever seen them consulted again by meeting participants. When is the last time you consulted meeting minutes after a meeting was over?” While we both laughed about my response, I was quite serious and didn’t know how serious I was myself until well after the call was over.
Simple guidelines for running technical document reviews remotely
With some clear expectations and a little planning upfront, running remote writing and document review projects can go smoothly. Here are some lessons I learned when I was a freelancer about running remote writing and editing projects:
Lessons learned from working as a computer book industry technical reviewer
I was a computer book technical reviewer earlier in my career. It was a freelance gig, but I still consider the work one of the more formative chapters in my professional writing career even though it wasn’t writing work.
Computer book technical reviewers sometimes called technical editors are responsible for ensuring the technical accuracy of information technology book manuscripts. The work taught me to pay attention to technical details, which in turn went on to influence my work as a technical writer and freelance writer.
The lessons I learned include:
