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May/June is a busy time for technical communicators, and this year was particularly so for me. Over a six-week period, I represented Expert Support at four events: Write the Docs Portland; the Write the Docs Local Meeting in San Francisco; the Open Source Summit in Minneapolis; and the AWS Summit in Los Angeles.  Here’s a mini-travelog

Your resume isn’t just a list of jobs, it’s quick, scannable proof that you can explain complex things clearly, work well with subject-matter experts, and ship documentation that helps real users. This article will help you create a compelling, effective technical writer resume. Companies increasingly rely on technical writers to support software products, internal systems, and

One of Expert Support’s most productive and satisfying engagements in recent memory has been our three-year collaboration with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a subsidiary of the Linux Foundation. Through the CNCF’s Documentation Assistance Program, the two organizations are working to strengthen open-source documentation as a scalable community capability across the cloud-native ecosystem. As a

To borrow a phrase from Willie Nelson, “I’m on the road again!” The reasons are two-fold: the upcoming Write the Docs 2026 conference in Portland, Oregon, on May 3-5 and the subsequent Write the Docs meetup in San Francisco on May 7. For those who don’t know, Write the Docs is a large global community

Many leaders think of technical documentation as a cost center or a support function – in other words, a necessary checkbox. At best, they see it as a necessary component of product delivery. But organizations that treat documentation as a strategic capability can unlock a benefit far more powerful than reduced support tickets, better customer

This post describes how developer documentation needs to cater to developers using AI tools to generate code.

Recently, a Content Wrangler newsletter arrived from Scott Abel that many of us here at Expert Support found to be inspiring and validating. Scott’s article is very much worth a read. He describes some easy steps you can take right now to heighten the credibility, trustworthiness, and effectiveness of the documentation you’re writing. While Scott

The data is in: High-quality documentation matters. When I recently attended the Write the Docs conference in Portland, and TechDocsCon at the Open Source Summit in Seattle, two presentations made this point abundantly clear.  At both conferences, I saw a fantastic presentation by Michelle Irvine, a technical writer with Google Cloud. Michelle has been working

On December 7, 2023, Expert Support’s CEO, Paul Gustafson, will be presenting at Write The Docs Australia 2023 in Melbourne. Paul’s presentation, Improving Documentation at Scale, describes a recent initiative started to improve the effectiveness of open source software, the scalable approach, and lessons learned so far. You can learn more about the conference here, and

[UPDATE: Due to technical difficulties with the webinar platform, this event has been postponed until January 10, 2024.] If you’re a career technical communication professional, you undoubtedly encounter people who don’t understand or appreciate the business value of technical writing.  Sometimes, these people are in roles where such understanding is crucial. To be successful, you

Effective technical overviews turn skeptics into customers The technical overview is a critical component of any developer-to-developer documentation suite. Regardless of whether the technology is a fundamental platform technology (such as a programming language) or a simple, incremental product (such as a plugin), the technical overview orients new developers who are just getting started with