arkadianriver

Technical writer support

For a 98-person organization

01 Feb 2023

Roles
Content DevOps Support, Software Developer, Technical Writer
Skills
Support, Training, Video, OBS, Kdenlive, Camtasia, Draw.io

Ever-passionate for learning, I’ve gained depth and breadth of knowledge about the technologies, skills, and art of my chosen profession, namely technical communication in the data software domain and, more recently, application development. A technical communicator at heart, the knowledge I gained has put me in a position to not only communicate technical concepts with customers, but also to support my peers. I’ve therefore become a go-to person in many areas:

  • Authoring in many text-based editing formats, including DITA XML since its inception, various flavors of Markdown, AsciiDoc, and classics such as SGML, Bookmaster, and IPF
  • Debugging and troubleshooting problems with the builds of those formats
  • Tips and tricks on using editing and source control applications, such as Oxygen XML Author, VS Code, Inkscape, Filenet, and Git
  • UI design and user experience, with constructive insight when collaborating
  • Software development, which resulted from my desire to create custom tools where the core applications were lacking, to include custom DITA XSLT and specializations, scripts, and web applications to guide the production workflow and apply documentation testing

In my effort to share with my peers, I’ve provided documentation, videos, demos during video calls, deskside assistance while screen sharing, …, any means necessary to give writers the support that they need. In particular, since 2015, I’ve provided more video content. Here I am, talking through the build workflow and referring to documentation I wrote, used to readily launch each of the cloud-based systems involved.

Still video capture of a remote training session.
Tip Inspired by IBM AI ContentOps Architect, Sarah Packowski, I believe that as better transcript processing technology comes available, we'll be able to make transcribed video content more readily available in product documentation and search queries of internal organizational knowledge, not only on YouTube as currently exists today.