Why should devs get all the fun with composability?

Imagine trying out simple things then connecting them into more sophisticated things.

Lather, rinse, repeat until you have your own custom solution.

And there’s that sweet hit of dopamine each time you do it.

egopontem.com/blog/cli-sor...

In the damp basement classrooms where they trained tech writers, they forbade us not to entertain our audience.

I’m here to say that we can inform *and* entertain. Behold the proof that is this coffee table book! And it has my fave foods: processed food, olive oil, and bugs you can eat.

Migrating to docs-as-code is a big step for a doc team. Congratulations!

There’s a big next step: Now you can easily process your doc set on the command line. Connect things together, see what works, see what doesn’t. Write more, let the machine do the fussing.

egopontem.com/blog/cli-sor...

I posted a fresh article but I feel bad about it. Let me apologize now for the horrible regret you’ll feel after the elation of “getting” redirection on the command line. You’ll wish you could have taken advantage of it sooner in your life.

egopontem.com/blog/cli-cat...

“As far as I’m concerned People of the Deer did nothing but good for individual people, the survivors... Nobody was going to pay any attention to them unless their situation was dramatized, and I dramatized it.”—Farley Mowat on being criticized for bending the facts.

Plus ça change. I found this in a used book shop when I had just started my career. Over 60 years later our tools have changed but the challenges haven’t.

Am I showing my age? I prefer Emacs the same way I prefer stick shift or a 35mm camera. They do only what I tell them to and don’t fall over themselves (and me) to do anything more. Sure, Emacs is always ready to do more, but only when I decide.

A picture is worth 3 orders of magnitude in words, a video 3 orders in pictures. The time it takes to make them is only 1 order of magnitude. Or, how to argue with your manager.

How many tech writers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Too many, they should automate that instead. I've created a set of command line tools that lets tech writers do that.

egopontem.com/blog/tech-wr...

Apparently the title in Italy is Il cucchiaio d'argento. Here's my copy of an English translation. It's the kinda book that I wish I had thought of first: concise, clear, consistent, complete (for some definition of "complete"), and delicious.

#cookbook #techwriting #friedzucchiniflowers

So many disciplines have codified what they do, a framework or a foundation that work is built on. If tech writing had the same, the first rule should be "Be correct".

egopontem.com/blog/7cs#cor...

#techwriting #becorrect

Remember how I said that awk is underrated? Well GNU awk 5.3.0 does CSV natively. It's the Shinkansen train from CSV to markdown.

egopontem.com/blog/csv-to-md

#techwriting #markdown

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve said that technical writers have shitty tools, I’d have dozens of dollars by now. (Maybe I should raise my rates.) The problem isn’t the software that we use, it’s the tedious parts between the software.

egopontem.com/blog/coding-...

#techwriter #coding

I'm showing tech writers how to master the command line.

A tech writer with command-line superpowers knows all about working with directories.

egopontem.com/blog/cli-dir...

#coding #techwriter #commandline