One thing I noticed when I started working in software was the odd ways people use the first person. A support guy on the phone once said to me, “Go ahead and uninstall us, then run the installer again.” (Support people are required to start every sentence with “Go ahead and.”) He meant, of course, [...]
I’ve been resisting micro-blogging until now, but I just set up a thingy to automatically copy the subject lines of blog posts into tweets, just for the hell of it. So now I’m tweeting. This is its maiden voyage right here.
Before agile, I worked mostly from functional specs. That was frustrating. In real life, requirements shift to reflect the changing priorities of the powerful, and functionality follows, in complex ways. The only way to write about it reliably is to try to understand how power works in your organization, and then dive into the day-to-day [...]
What’s the difference between writing for cloud software and writing for traditional software? Time frame: Web app development tends to work on a faster cycle than packaged software. You can’t ship a new book with every release. You learn to work incrementally. Your work is always ready to go, but never fully finished. Structure: I’m [...]
Tech writing (my beloved profession) barely makes it on the top ten list of most rewarding careers.
I’m going to the national tech writers’ convention in Sacramento next month. I’ve been to a couple of these and they’re always fun and interesting. I only go to the ones that are held in cities where I know someone I can stay with. This time I’m staying with Nic and Bert, who live in [...]
Here’s me in my living room, banging out XML and listening in on a phone meeting. Am I spoiled? I suspect so.
Very much looking forward to the promised WikiLeaks dump of bank docs, probably from Bank of America from what I’ve heard. In the meantime, I’m liking this guy’s suggestion to help make it harder for the bad guys to shut down WikiLeaks. Basically, you provide a dummy web address with “wikileaks” in it. When people [...]
I’ve been reading Borges again, for the first time since college, if you don’t count the way you glance through stuff while moving books around over the years. It came to mind because Laura was reading Isabel Allende, and I suggested that if she enjoyed that she might like 100 Years of Solitude. She liked [...]
This is for Laura.
This is what we’re up against. Perfectly intelligent people can’t tell a white paper from a user guide.
before getting too excited. I don’t think they really have these cool floating cities yet.
I usually don’t go in for April Fool’s kind of stuff, but this is moderately funny, in a mildly geeky way.
Here’s a sane and fair-minded account of why the people who write our entertainment (without whom, of course, there would be no entertainment) started withholding their labor power this week. (Note for comics fans, such as Laura: the speaker, Brian Vaughan, did some of the writing on Runaways, our current favorite Marvel series.) This fight [...]
My friend Jeff, a CollabNet engineer and an astronomer, got up damn early the other morning and made these spectacular shots of the lunar eclipse.
Way cool. Obviously the biggest use of cabs is to get from the airport to the financial district and back. In San Francisco, that means to the upper right quadrant of the city map.
This and this, taken together, are about the coolest thing I have seen on the Web in months.
Writing is not a team activity. Editing is a team activity. Writing never works collectively, because it depends on a large number of threads being held simultaneously in a person’s short-term memory. That’s not something you can share. It’s a waste of time to try. Of course, people try all the time. We can see [...]
I met the software architect for this cool Web 2.0 company at a staff party for one of the schools Mary works at. I’m thinking this could be a very useful tool for settling some of the burning questions that keep me awake nights, such as: State capitalism, or deformed worker’s state? State capitalism Deformed [...]
Here’s the web site for Starr King school that I put together using WordPress last month. It’s going public this weekend at the school district enrollment fair. It came to a surprisingly small effort, compared with what it used to take to make a decent-looking web site. WordPress takes care of a whole lot of [...]