This is the first of two blog posts I will write about Write The Docs Europe. I'll kick-off by writing about my presentation, but later I will write about my views of the event as a whole.
Background
I spoke at the Write The Docs Unconference in Berlin last year. At the time I talked about how Free Software projects emerge from an idea to success and some of the "laws" they abide by in order to get there. As part of that presentation I wanted to begin my personal journey of better-understanding the "laws" followed by tech writers. The subsequent workshops around this topic produced some interesting results for which the results can be read here.
In Prague I wanted to move from a "pull" to a "push" model and presented some of the laws that apply to software engineers (not just Free Software).
Presentation & Notes
- Slide 2:
- I come from the engineering perspective, not the tech writing perspective
- I am here to learn and to improve my own working practices
- Slide 3:
- Sturgeon's Law
- Really, "10% is where we add value"
- Slide 4:
- Management is very important in Free Software
- See myself as a community manager, but many would not
- I'm not a cat-herder, I focus more on "classical" management in Free Software
- Slide 5:
- Document writers are all just as individual as software engineers
- Just like engineers, however, they share common problems < something I learned at Write The Docs Berlin
- Slides 6 - 10:
- Hopefully, self-explanitory
- Slide 12:
- Notice something about these laws of software engineering?
- The context they were written about is software engineering... but really these laws have nothing to do with software engineering!
- Slide 13:
- Lehmann's 5th law: teaches us that all stakeholders in the development process (and this definitely includes tech writers) must continue to master the product for it to remain competitive
- Slide 15:
- I love Free Software and Open Source as concepts
- But the names are engineering biased: "Free Software", "Open Source"
- As these forms of licensing/development become the norm the terms will become irrelevant
- When this happens, we must ensure that our focus is on Free/Open products, for which excellent documentation is crucial
Reaction
Really great talk by @therealpadams @ #writethedocs witty, packed with insights. Need to get him to London for the meetups :)
— Kristof Van Tomme (@kvantomme) September 1, 2015
Woah! Open source software is a "product". But the term contains engineeringeese, which is a cultural issue. @therealpadams #writethedocs
— Samuel Wright (@plaindocs) September 1, 2015
Point @therealpadams is making with these "engineering" laws is that they're not engineering laws. They're management "laws". #WriteTheDocs
— Karen Mardahl (@kmdk) September 1, 2015
Awwww ❄ @therealpadams #writethedocs pic.twitter.com/5rTjbS4obF
— Ancsur (@Ancsur2002) September 1, 2015
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