Explore every episode of the podcast The Not-Boring Tech Writer
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kate sounds off on making things better | 23 juil. 2026 | 00:25:07 | |
In this solo episode, I share my latest content updates progress and reflect on my takeaways from Vladimir Izmalkov’s interview (S3:E40). I also share my definition of productive procrastination, a documentation jobs board maintained by Adam Pugh, and our new “Hire a tech writer” program here on the podcast. —
I reflect on my interview with Vladimir Izmalkov, both in the utility of his tech writer skill tree but also how we both want our documentation to make someone’s life better or, as Vladimir put it “making [complicated things] simpler for people to enjoy them with less effort and less time spent.” Vladimir and Heather’s episodes complement each other well, both discussing nonlinear ways that skills can be developed and/or matched to new job opportunities. And in the vein of job opportunities, I share two resources that may help you if you’re looking for work or looking to hire. The first is Adam Pugh’s good documentation jobs sheet, which is free and available to the public. He updates this periodically using tools that evaluate the content of a job, rather than just the title, and he gave me permission to share it on the show. The second is a new program we’re launching here on the podcast called Hire a tech writer, designed for those of you looking to hire awesome not-boring writers to share your open positions with our listener base in the hopes we can connect awesome listeners with each other. There’s a lot of uncertainty in our industries and roles right now, and we hope these resources help you navigate some of that uncertainty. In this episode:
Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Mapping your technical writing skill tree with Vladimir Izmalkov | 09 juil. 2026 | 00:54:19 | |
In this episode, I talk with Vladimir Izmalkov, an experienced technical communicator who has built and managed documentation teams and worked across open source and enterprise software in both English and Russian. We talk about his RPG-inspired "skill tree" for technical writers, how mapping your skills into different "classes" can help you make sense of a nonlinear career, and how to build a personal grading system that lets you evaluate yourself against a job's requirements and pitch your adjacent skills with confidence. — Vladimir and I discuss his winding path into technical writing, which began at a Russian research institute where he worked on information and communication systems for emergency response, before he realized that his mix of technical breadth and a knack for working with documents pointed toward technical writing. We talk about his move to the UK to work at a London startup documenting an open source database, the tension he felt blending honest technical documentation with marketing, and his current role at Canonical, where the team calls themselves "technical authors" to reflect their authority over documentation and their collaborative, guidance-focused work with engineers. The heart of our conversation is Vladimir's RPG-inspired "skill tree" for technical writers, a model he developed to capture how nonlinear and multidimensional our careers really are. He explains how the many skills a tech writer can develop behave like independent dimensions, and how thinking in terms of "classes" (like a linguistics-focused writer, a tech-curious engineer, a "docs tool sage" who loves automation and tooling, a marketer, or a team leader) can help you make sense of your own experience. We discuss visualizing all of this on a radar chart, and why the real value isn't the picture itself but the deeper understanding it gives you of your strengths and gaps. We also dig into the practical grading system that makes the skill tree useful for job hunting. Vladimir walks through how to build a leveling scale from a job posting's requirements, grade yourself honestly against it, and then identify where adjacent skills can compensate for gaps, using the example of pitching Docs as Code experience when a role calls for DITA. We close on AI as its own branch of the skill tree, including why Vladimir is cautious about generating documentation from scratch and why his most reliable results come from using AI to build deterministic, testable scripts he can automate rather than automating the AI itself. About Vladimir Izmalkov: Vladimir Izmalkov is a technical writer with 15+ years of experience creating developer-oriented documentation in Russian and English. A docs-as-code advocate, he has documented NoSQL databases, cloud platforms, and distributed systems, and takes a thoughtful, cautious approach to AI in technical documentation. In this episode:
Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact Vladimir Izmalkov: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Kate sounds off on building confidence | 25 juin 2026 | 00:25:04 | |
In this solo episode, I share my latest content updates progress and reflect on my takeaways from Heather Zoppetti’s interview (S3:E38). I also share some thoughts on shifting from focusing on reducing stress to building confidence and share an anecdote about how my podcast t-shirt helped me discover a local tech writer in the wild. —
I reflect on my interview with Heather Zoppetti, a former software developer and knitwear business owner. I love how Heather combined her software developer tech chops with a decade of crafting knitwear patterns and content to get her first tech writing job. I reflect on the similarities in our approaches and outlooks around getting feedback from other writers and viewing varied or unusual experiences as beneficial for a technical communicator. I’m trying to embrace her idea of technical communication’s goal of building confidence in your end-user, reader, or watcher, which I think is a much more positive way of framing my whole “reduce stress” goal. I close by talking about all the different forms that technical communication can take, and therefore all the different paths and roles that technical communicators have. I share a story of a woman at a local natural foods store asking me questions about my podcast t-shirt, which culminated in me pointing out that if she writes SOPs, she’s a technical writer, too. In this episode:
Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Knitting together a technical writing career with Heather Zoppetti | 11 juin 2026 | 01:11:10 | |
In this episode, I talk with Heather Zoppetti, a senior technical writer who came to the field through software development and a decade spent running a hand-knitting pattern business. We talk about how technical communication shows up far beyond software documentation, how to recognize and reframe the transferable skills hiding in a nonlinear career, and why being willing to try something matters more than doing it perfectly. — Heather and I discuss her winding path into technical writing, which started with a career in software development, took a decade-long detour into running a hand-knitting pattern and yarn business, and eventually circled back to tech. When she returned to job hunting and realized she no longer recognized the skills developers were expected to have, she stumbled on a technical writing posting and recognized the work immediately: writing knitting patterns is technical communication. She applied using her knitting patterns as her writing portfolio, and we talk about why her tech writing instincts came more from designing knitwear than from her years as a developer. A central thread of our conversation is the idea that technical communication is far broader than software documentation. Heather pushed me to think beyond written text to formats like videos, live workshops, interactive lessons, and animated GIFs, and to recognize that different audiences and learning styles call for different approaches. We dig into her experiments with internal documentation at Vanguard, including running user research cohorts to learn the why behind how people use content, and why metrics alone can't tell you whether someone was genuinely absorbed or just stepped away from their desk. We also explore what happens when a docs team builds its own site using the design system it documents, and how "drinking your own champagne" surfaces bugs and builds trust with users. We spend much of the second half on transferable skills and how to reframe a nonlinear career for a tech writing role. Heather and I both believe more people have technical communication experience than they realize, whether it's a pet medication schedule, a tax prep sheet, a restaurant menu, or a cheat sheet you wrote so your family stops calling you for help. We talk about treating your resume and cover letter as their own forms of technical communication, mapping your experience to the language in a job description, and why good documentation ultimately leaves your reader feeling confident they can do the thing. Heather closes with a reminder that stuck with me: you don't have to go all in to try something, and the only real way to find out if something is for you is to give it a go. About Heather Zoppetti: Heather Zoppetti, from Philadelphia, has a rich background in computer science and technical writing. Her current professional journey has her spending her days programming, creating tooling for engineers, and writing documentation. When she’s not typing away at code or text, Heather’s knitting, painting, or performing some other needle witchcraft like cross-stitch. She loves coffee, cats, and the Oxford comma. In this episode:
Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact Heather Zoppetti: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Kate sounds off on stress reduction | 28 mai 2026 | 00:19:57 | |
In this solo episode, I share my latest content updates progress and reflect on my takeaways from Florian Lefebvre’s interview (S3:E36). I also share some thoughts on how documentation leads can reduce stress for contributors or reviewers. —
I reflect on my interview with Florian Lefebvre, co-maintainer of Astro. I love Florian’s story arc of going from someone who self-described as “lazy” and “not enthusiastic” about docs to becoming someone for whom docs are an essential part of building a feature. And I love how Astro Docs uses "talking and doc-ing" meetings to work through core concepts rather than turn them into grammar nitpick fests, lowering the barrier for non-native English speakers and folks who aren’t professional writers to produce clear, accurate documentation. I close by reflecting on the ways that the processes Sarah Rainsberger, docs lead at Astro Docs, has built processes that have reduced stress for her contributors, including the talking and doc-ing meetings but also the single page for experimental features, taking on the responsibility of content hierarchy, multiple pages, and cross-references for herself. I use a vaguely similar approach here at KnowledgeOwl but I haven’t tried the single page approach, and I may have to try this out with my team. In my own experience, decisions about naming pages and deciding where they live in the content hierarchy are some of the most stressful tasks for my team, and removing those as tasks has made them a lot more excited to contribute to documentation. In this episode:
Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Writing docs as an open source developer with Florian Lefebvre | 14 mai 2026 | 00:58:30 | |
In this episode, I talk with Florian Lefebvre, a core maintainer of the open source Astro framework, about what it looks like to write and contribute to docs as a developer. We discuss his mindset shift from being reluctant about docs to seeing them as essential to shipping a feature, how he collaborates with a dedicated docs lead through "talking and doc-ing" calls, the importance of writing changesets from the user's perspective, and how reviewing community contributions doubles as a way to teach new contributors your project's docs conventions.
Florian and I discuss his path into the Astro core team, which started with answering questions on the project's Discord as a user and eventually led to being invited to join the core team. He shares how he was initially reluctant about writing docs, but his perspective shifted as he came to see docs as inseparable from shipping a feature. As Florian puts it, if you build something and nobody knows it exists or how to use it, your feature doesn't really exist. A central thread of our conversation is Florian's collaboration with Sarah Rainsberger, the Astro docs lead. We dig into their "talking and doc-ing" calls, where Sarah reads back her understanding of a feature and the two iterate together until the docs are technically accurate. Florian highlights how having a dedicated docs lead removes a lot of pressure, especially as a non-native English speaker. He can focus on getting the technical content right and trust Sarah to handle phrasing. We also discuss the value of asking "Is this what you meant?" as a confidence check, rather than making edits based on assumed understanding. Beyond the collaboration with Sarah, we also cover the practical side of contributing docs as a developer, including reviewing community PRs, writing user-focused changesets, and handling docs for experimental features. Florian explains his approach to coaching new contributors through review comments rather than pointing them to guidelines, why he writes changesets focused on what the user cares about rather than what the developer did to fix something, and how Astro keeps experimental feature docs as a single page until the feature stabilizes. Florian closes with a small but powerful philosophy from the Astro Docs team: every contribution just has to be "not worse than what we had before." About Florian Lefebvre: Fullstack developer. Freelancer. Astro core maintainer & TSC member. Open-Source lover. French. Two-time winner of the Astro Community Award. In this episode:
Resources discussed in this episode:
Also recommended by Florian: Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact Florian Lefebvre: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Kate sounds off on community | 30 avr. 2026 | 00:22:15 | |
In this solo episode, I share my latest content updates progress and reflect on my takeaways from Eric Holscher’s interview (S3:E34). I also share some thoughts on supporting institutions we care about and how to keep “community” from being an unpleasant word. —
I reflect on my interview with Eric Holscher, co-founder of the Write the Docs conference. The conference had very humble, minimal roots: the founders all wanted a space for people passionate about documentation to come together and share ideas and then just decided to launch a conference. It grew organically over time. I finally tracked down where I got the idea of “supporting the institutions you care about” from my interview with Eric. Turns out it came from Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, from his lesson titled “Defend Institutions.” Volunteering for something like Write the Docs is a form of defending an institution I care about, and I hope you can similarly find ways to defend the institutions you care about. I also dig into the idea of community, especially on the fact that community exists on a spectrum between value-adding and value-extracting, which Eric mentioned in his interview. I introduce some ideas from Ari Weinzweig’s newsletter that recast this dichotomy as making and taking, and I explore ways that building community is like building documentation, tying these ideas to a quote from Wendell Berry. In this episode:
Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Building a home for documentarians with Eric Holscher | 16 avr. 2026 | 01:07:45 | |
In this episode, I talk with Eric Holscher, co-founder of Read the Docs and Write the Docs, about building and sustaining a community for people who care about documentation. We discuss the origin story of Write the Docs, how the conference and community have evolved over 13 years, the value of Lightning Talks and Unconference sessions for fostering organic connection, how AI is reshaping the role of technical writers and developers, and why supporting the institutions you care about matters now more than ever. —
We explore the conference elements that make Write the Docs feel different from other events, including Lightning Talks as an on-ramp for first-time speakers, Unconference sessions that let attendees organize discussions around what they're excited about, and Writing Day as a hands-on collaborative experience. I share how Writing Day is evolving this year to include skill-based tracks like Git workshops and resume/portfolio reviews to address the community's changing needs. We also discuss how the community's makeup has shifted over the years from a more developer-heavy audience to one that's primarily tech writers, and the intentional work that goes into keeping the conference broadly welcoming. We dig into Eric's values-driven approach to conference organizing, including keeping sponsors off the main stage, avoiding tool-specific talks that can feel like sales pitches, and defaulting to openness with resources like talk recordings and the Write the Docs topic index. We also touch on AI's impact on the tech writing profession, where Eric offers an optimistic perspective: because writing quality is harder to objectively test than code, the depth of understanding and explainability that writers bring may become even more valuable. The episode wraps up with a discussion of supporting the institutions you care about and the challenges of building sustainable community organizations. About Eric Holscher: Eric Holscher is the co-founder of Read the Docs, Write the Docs, and EthicalAds. While studying computer science at the University of Mary Washington, Eric's passion for documentation was sparked by reading the Django documentation on a family vacation and discovering how transformative well-written docs could be. He co-founded Read the Docs in 2010 as an open source documentation hosting platform, which has grown into his full-time work for over a decade. In 2013, he co-founded Write the Docs, which began as a conference for Read the Docs users but quickly evolved into a global community for anyone who cares about documentation, with conferences on multiple continents, a thriving Slack community, and local meetups worldwide. He also co-founded EthicalAds, a privacy-focused ad network, and helped start PyCascades, a Pacific Northwest Python conference. Eric lives in Bend, Oregon, and spends as much time as possible exploring the outdoors on foot or by bike. If you run into him at an event, remember the Pac-Man Rule: always leave room for someone else to join the circle. In this episode:
Resources discussed in this episode:
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| Kate sounds off on lovable docs | 02 avr. 2026 | 00:32:11 | |
In this solo episode, I share my latest content updates progress and reflect on my takeaways from Jacob Moses’ interview (S3:E32). I also share some thoughts on applying concepts about lovable neighborhoods to documentation. —
I reflect on my interview with Jacob Moses, especially all the skills he took from his tech writing career and used in his real estate development work at Care Block. I share five ideas that came up in our discussion around neighborhoods and community development that are equally applicable to documentation:
I also dig a lot deeper into the idea of lovable neighbors and lovable documentation, sharing some insights from Henrik Kniberg’s blog post on earliest testable/usable/lovable products and trying to apply those principles to documentation. I argue that documentation can be one of the most lovable parts of your product or company, and that if we recognize that premise, we should identify ways that readers will feel loved by our documentation to focus our efforts on. I tie this to Kelton Noyes’ changes to new employee orientation and ramp-up time shared in S3:E28, where he reduced onboarding and ramp-up from three weeks of training plus a three month ramp-up period down to two weeks total. I also argue that the idea of reciprocity can help guide us toward more lovable docs, quoting Jacob: “If you build a lovable place, it will be loved in return by whomever you’re leasing the home to.” Our readers won’t love our docs unless we do, so we should focus on building documentation we know our readers need and doing it in a way that is thorough and lovely. I close by reflecting on the idea of if my documentation is a neighborhood, what kind of neighborhood would it be and how does that change what I prioritize? In this episode:
Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| From tech writing to building lovable neighborhoods with Jacob Moses | 19 mars 2026 | 01:06:33 | |
In this episode, I talk with Jacob Moses, the founder and original host of The Not-Boring Tech Writer podcast, about how the skills and values he developed as a tech writer have shaped his journey into community development and real estate. We discuss his concept of building "lovable places," how user-centered thinking and empathy translate from documentation to neighborhood development, the power of tight feedback loops and self-service documentation for tenants and clients, and how the Write the Docs Pac-Man rule has changed his life and his work. — Jacob and I discuss his path from studying technical communication at the University of North Texas to founding The Not-Boring Tech Writer podcast in 2016 to his current work as owner of Care Block Development, a real estate development company specializing in historic rehabs in Denton, Texas. Throughout his career transitions, Jacob has carried core tech writing values with him, including user empathy, iterative improvement, and the importance of tight feedback loops. We explore how Care Block's mission of building "lovable places" connects to ideas about product lovability in the software world and why solvency matters for any organization that wants to do good work for the people it serves. We dig into the ways Jacob applies tech writing skills and principles in his real estate and community development work. He walks us through examples like creating onboarding documentation for new tenants with laminated cards and QR codes, offering multiple communication paths for work orders to accommodate different engagement preferences, and providing self-help guides for emergency situations. On the general contracting side, he shares how he uses project management software to give clients real-time transparency into the estimating process, a move that was counterintuitive to others in his industry but aligned with his commitment to centering humans in every interaction. We also discuss the Strong Towns approach to public investment, which centers on humbly observing where people struggle, doing the next small thing to address that struggle, and repeating. Jacob connects this to tech writing's iterative, user-centered mindset and to Elinor Ostrom's concept of "cheap talk," which emphasizes meeting people where they are and letting them communicate in ways that feel comfortable. We touch on AI's role in documentation and the irreplaceable value of human empathy, and Jacob shares the piece of advice that has most impacted his life and work: the Write the Docs Pac-Man rule of always leaving room for another person to join the circle. About Jacob Moses: Jacob Moses is the founder and original host of The Not-Boring Tech Writer podcast, which he launched in 2016 to celebrate tech writers and push back against the stereotype that technical writing is boring. He studied technical communication at the University of North Texas, and his first gig out of college was as a tech writer at Rainmaker Digital (formerly Copyblogger Media). Since then, he's carried the skills and values he cultivated as a tech writer into community development and real estate. Today, Jacob is owner of Care Block Development, a real estate development company that acquires, rehabs, and manages historic buildings in Denton, Texas. Pairing historic preservation with thoughtful improvements, Care Block honors the culture of the neighborhoods in which it works to create lovable places for the people it serves. He's also the owner of Sardinha, a premium tinned seafood pop-up pushing premium tins in Denton. If you need a tinfish plug in Denton, Jacob is your guy. In this episode:
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| Kate sounds off on docs symbiosis | 05 mars 2026 | 00:25:09 | |
In this solo episode, I share my latest content updates progress and reflect on my takeaways from Bill Holland’s interview (S3:E30). I also share my attempts to reframe the idea of strategic documentation projects and maintenance as competing for time to the idea of them being in a deeply symbiotic relationship. —
I reflect on my interview with Bill Holland and how many of the tips he gives for tech writers to communicate with designers are the kinds of work we do all the time. First, provide a brief that explains things in detail, especially any special terminology or acronyms. Define what you want to get out of the project, what its intent is, and what the most important thing you want to communicate is. Assume that the designer knows nothing about the project or industry. Second, share moodboards, graphic samples, or video playlists that have an aesthetic you like so a designer can get a feel for the style you’re after. Third, provide solid, detailed feedback on designs or roughs, tying the criticism back to your style samples or your brief. Tech writers and designers have a lot in common: we all need to educate our clients about how the process works, guide them to what they need, potentially justify the cost of our services and our expertise, and handle the opportunities and disruption that AI is throwing into our respective fields. I’m trying to find new ways to manage the tension between spending time on routine documentation maintenance and tackling large strategic projects. We tend to talk about this tension as a form of competition, that the tasks compete for our time. Instead, I’m applying a narrative reframing I borrowed from Suzanne Simard’s book Finding the Mother Tree, and recognizing that there’s a symbiotic relationship between the two. One can’t exist without the other, and they each help the other. I hope that reframing might be useful for you. In this episode:
Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Collaborating with designers and animators with Bill Holland | 19 févr. 2026 | 01:25:20 | |
In this episode, I talk with Bill Holland, a motion graphics designer and video producer, about how tech writers can effectively collaborate with visual creators. We discuss what to include in a creative brief, how to give constructive feedback to designers, setting realistic expectations for animation types and budgets, and how AI is changing but not replacing visual creative work. —
We dig into the world of motion graphics and animation, where Bill explains the wide range of animation types and their associated costs, from simple text animation to puppet animation to traditional hand-drawn animation. He stresses the importance of investing in pre-production, including style frames and storyboards, to catch problems early before animation work begins. We also discuss how to give constructive feedback to designers: lead with what's working, be specific about what isn't, and reference your original mood board or brief to articulate where the disconnect is. We also explore how to evaluate potential designers or animators when hiring, including what to look for in a portfolio and the trade-offs between hiring experienced professionals versus newer talent. The episode wraps up with a discussion of AI's role in visual creation. Bill shares his perspective as someone actively working with AI tools alongside traditional methods, emphasizing that AI works best as part of a hybrid workflow rather than as a wholesale replacement for skilled designers. About Bill Holland: Bill Holland (also known by his alias Bill Netherlands) is a motion graphics generalist with an extensive background in video production. With an educational foundation in Art and Design, Bill has worked on every aspect of the motion process from scripting through sound mixing. His early career shooting and editing video informs his storytelling, staging, and pacing in motion graphics today. Bill has created motion graphics and editing work for clients including Google, PBS, NASCAR, the American Dental Association, and Hilton Hotels, earning multiple Telly, Communicator, and Davey awards. He previously ran his own company, Middlebranch Productions, Inc., before rebranding under the Bill Netherlands name at a fellow designer's suggestion. In this episode:
Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact Bill Holland: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Kate sounds off on process (and LEGO) | 05 févr. 2026 | 00:29:31 | |
In this solo episode, I share my latest progress updates as I recover from finishing my big project, along with updates on my daily check-in form. I reflect on some of the key takeaways from Kelton Noyes’ interview (S3:E28) and how my love for process makes my life easier as a tech writer. — I’ve been working on catching up on the release tail from finishing my project and getting my docs backlog under control, which has included replacing gifs with short mp4s, creating guidelines for my coworkers to more easily create new pages or update existing pages in the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base, and knocking out a bunch of low-hanging fruit docs tasks. I’ve also picked up a project I paused in late 2024: updating our API endpoint documentation. I’ve been reworking the documentation to better align with our API’s current reality and requirements and adding some quality of life improvements for myself. I’ve been consistently using the daily check-in form I outlined in episode 27, and I’m largely happy with it, though it hasn’t yet helped me improve my appreciations and high-fives for my teammates. I also reflect on Kelton’s observations about how documentation should help people to not feel dumb, how getting hands-on with tools during the evaluation process can help refine and reshape your documentation hierarchy of needs, and how his success in transitioning from a support role to a tech writing role was about focusing on selling himself as the person to do documentation, rather than on selling the documentation itself. I also reflect on one of my key personality traits that I believe makes me more successful as a tech writer: loving the process to do things rather than the product I create. I share anecdotes about LEGO, jigsaw puzzles, and thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. Sometimes this strength is also my biggest weakness, so this month I’m focusing on trying to release more even if it feels like the process still wants me to keep working. In this episode:
Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Advocating for docs and choosing tools with Kelton Noyes | 22 janv. 2026 | 01:17:20 | |
In this episode, I talk with Kelton Noyes, a senior technical communicator who started his career in tech support and gradually built his way into documentation. We discuss how to choose documentation tools, practical strategies for making the business case for investing in documentation, and how Kelton successfully advocated for technical writing as a valuable full-time discipline within his organization. — Kelton and I discuss his journey from tech support to technical writing, which began with his frustration at answering the same questions repeatedly. He started creating documentation between support calls to fill gaps he noticed, sharing these resources with coworkers who found them valuable. His managers appreciated the work, but nobody initially recognized documentation as a full-time role. We explore how he eventually made the transition by demonstrating concrete value through metrics like reduced support volume and faster training ramp-up times and shifting the conversation from advocating for the importance of documentation to advocating for himself as the person to do that documentation. We dive deep into Kelton's approach to choosing documentation tools, including how to develop a hierarchy of needs based on customer feedback, organizational requirements, and author workflow. He shares the importance of taking advantage of demos and free trials to explore features hands-on, explaining how requirements often evolve during this exploration process as you discover capabilities you didn't know you needed. We also explore red flags that indicate it's time to reevaluate your tooling, the challenge of finding tools that serve multiple departments, and how to navigate the collaborative aspects of getting organizational buy-in for documentation initiatives. About Kelton Noyes: Kelton Noyes is an English major with a love of technology who spent years trying to find a way to blend the two. He started his career working technical support jobs across a variety of industries, including web hosting, security, data storage, solar, and shipping. Everywhere he went, he found a lack of documentation. Between support calls, he started creating documentation to fill those gaps. He documented workflows and processes that impacted his job and shared them with coworkers, who widely used and appreciated the resources. His managers and coworkers loved the work he was doing, but nobody at the time saw documentation as a full-time role. Fast forward several years to a job interview where the hiring manager recognized the company's need for documentation and loved Kelton's background doing exactly that. Kelton started in tech support to learn the product and began building documentation in his second week. Six years and two promotions later, he's never been happier professionally than he is building documentation full time. When he's not documenting, Kelton enjoys cooking, board games, reading, debating, general handy work, gardening, and playing music. In this episode:
Resources discussed in this episode: Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact Kelton Noyes: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Kate sounds off on self-documentation | 08 janv. 2026 | 00:30:47 | |
In this solo episode, I share my latest content updates progress (spoiler: I finished my project! 🎉). I also share the new daily check-in Google Form I’m trying, inspired by Kate Pond’s interview (S3:E24), as well as some general thoughts on the power of self-documentation and a call for more intermittent or unofficial tech writing guests. — I finally finished my project to update the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base to align with major navigation and UI changes we rolled out in December 2024! 🎉 I updated and archived a ton of articles, completed a tags audit, overhauled our internal guidance on using tags, and submitted a pull request to the Microsoft Entra docs to update their KnowledgeOwl SSO docs. Along the way, I had to trim my scope and toss a lot of additional ideas or changes into a separate backlog list. Now that I’ve completed the project, I’m hoping to work through that separate backlog list as time permits. I used Kate Pond’s blog post about her daily check-ins as a strawman to create my own daily check-in Google Form for my work and I share the questions I’m using. I’ll report back on my usage of it in my next solo episode. I also share a previously unreleased clip from Kate Pond’s interview in which I describe a form of self-documentation I’ve used in my personal life to manage a chronic illness, many of the benefits to using self-documentation in this way, and some tips for trying it out yourself. I reflect on Kate Pond’s career journey and share what I see as some of the key steps in that journey that others might be able to replicate. I close the episode by noting that I’m really trying to include more unofficial or intermittent tech writers like Kate Pond, so if you or someone you know has written documentation without calling yourself a tech writer, please come on the show! Feel free to use our guest suggestions form. In this episode:
Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| A peek behind the curtain: 2025 clips episode | 25 déc. 2025 | 00:35:04 | |
In this episode, I share clips from my conversations with Liz Argall, Dennis Dawson, Sarah Walker, Ryan Macklin, Nick Graziade, Janine Chan, and Kate Pond. The clips include outtakes, sound check moments, and segments we cut for time from our 2025 interviews.
This episode is different from our usual format. Instead of a single guest interview, I'm sharing clips that we cut from this year's episodes or captured during our pre-recording sound checks. Most of these clips didn't make it into the final episodes due to time constraints, but they contain insights and moments I didn't want to lose entirely. The clips range from lighthearted sound check banter to substantive discussions that didn't fit the final edit. Sarah Walker and I dig deeper into the concept of "beginner's mind" and how returning to documentation you haven't touched in a while can be both humbling and instructive. Ryan Macklin extends empathy advocacy to include ourselves and reminds us that understanding where frustrated customers are coming from doesn't mean we have to accept abusive behavior. Nick Graziade and I explore the limitations of hierarchy as the sole approach to information architecture and why metadata-driven organization can sometimes serve users better than deep folder structures. And Kate Pond and I briefly discuss weekly check-ins and the idea of gamifying daily reflection. There are also some fun moments from sound checks with Liz Argall and Dennis Dawson, plus a clip from Janine Chan's episode that I couldn't resist revisiting. Consider this a peek behind the curtain at how the podcast comes together as well as a thank you to all of our 2025 guests for being so generous with their time and insights! Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky In this episode:
Original Season 3 episodes featuring these guests:
Guest bios: Liz Argall creates empowering documentation and processes; where you need it, when you need it. She’s a technical writer, program manager, author, and trainer who delivers humanizing, data informed, accessible, and technically complex projects for a range of organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to a community development organization in Uganda. In a past life, she was a professional artist talent scout and she’s still a professional member of SFWA (now called the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association). She’s a graduate of Clarion Writers Workshop, has been critiqued by multiple New York Times best selling authors, and has critiqued the stories of multiple award winning authors, which is a long way of saying that she likes to give a good portfolio critique! Like many baby-boomers, Dennis still hasn't decided what he wants to be when he grows up. He's a technical writer with 40 years' experience in technical communications providing documentation, training, and user support; a sketchnotes artist for Write the Docs; a 3-time Distinguished Toastmaster and Past District 57 Governor who's won District Champion titles in Humorous, Tall Tales, and Evaluation contests; a volunteer Santa Claus at San Jose Christmas in the Park; and a volunteer drawing teacher at local elementary schools. Sarah's been writing and crafting stories since she was able to put pencil to a Peanuts 3x5 top-spiral memo pad and record her stories in her own scribbly alphabet. Since personal alphabets scribbled on tiny pieces of paper don't pay the rent, she embarked on her career as a professional writer and editor after graduating from St. Edward's University (Austin, TX) in 1998. As an industry editor with Hoover's for roughly seven years, she covered biotech, pharmaceuticals, health care systems, venture capital, investment firms, and other sectors as a member of the Finance and Health Care editorial team. She earned her Austinite bone fides by getting hired by and, 18 months later, laid off by Dell, where she served as a technical editor for the Global Technical Training and Curriculum Team for products and software for consumers as well as small and midsize businesses. Thanks to the Great Recession and other market forces and personal demands, she bounced around a bit from writing and editing features, self-help book summaries, U.S. Pharmacopeia monographs, and other technical-ish content. She began her technical writing career in earnest at Libre Digital, where she spent much of the second decade of the 21st century documenting procedures for processing various magazine titles as well as a platform for book publishers to distribute their titles to digital marketplaces. After a two-year stint as the managing editor (and lone full-time, non-contract employee) of a local bimonthly magazine targeting affluent residents of "West Austin," at long last (in August 2020), Sarah landed a job that gave her the Technical Writer job title, and she's been writing about the Monetate platform ever since. Sarah's second career as a yoga instructor (and briefly a Pilates mat instructor) began in 2005, after she completed her 250-hour instructor training with Yoga Yoga (now defunct, just like the college in Santa Fe, NM that she attended for the first two years of her undergrad studies). She taught part-time until 2012, when primary job demands and other responsibilities forced her to give it up. | |||
| Kate sounds off on 2025 | 11 déc. 2025 | 00:23:38 | |
In this solo episode, I share my latest content update progress. I also reflect on all of 2025 hosting this podcast, offering lessons learned about tech writing and myself alongside gratitude to this year’s awesome guests and listeners like you. — I’ve continued my work to update the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base to align with major navigation and UI changes we rolled out in December 2024. I’ve finished my official punchdown list and am working through some spot checks and searches to verify I didn’t overlook anything in that list. This episode is my final solo episode of 2025, so it felt appropriate to reflect a bit on how this year has gone. I share seven lessons about tech writers and tech writing I’ve distilled from the year:
I also share some lessons I learned about myself and offer a ton of gratitude, most especially to the awesome roster of amazing, talented people who graced me with interviews this year, and also to all the folks behind the scenes who make this possible. We are, slowly but surely, building a solid not-boring community, and I look forward to another year of doing the same! Resources discussed in this episode: Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Self-documentation for career growth with Kate Pond | 27 nov. 2025 | 00:51:04 | |
In this episode, I talk with Kate Pond, a software engineer and former park ranger who turned self-documentation into a career superpower. We discuss her practical system of using Google Forms to track daily work and accomplishments, how this helps with performance reviews and job interviews, and why documenting your own work is essential for professional growth. — Kate Pond and I discuss her unique path from park ranger to software engineer and how documentation played a crucial role throughout her career transitions. She shares how creating personal runbooks as a college RA taught her that writing things down once saves countless hours of reinventing the wheel later. We explore how this philosophy extended into her transition to software engineering, where she documented everything she learned at technical meetups. The heart of our conversation centers on Kate's Google Forms system for self-documentation, which she created to track her daily work, accomplishments, and professional development. She explains how the system uses a mix of checkbox ratings (like "how do you feel right now?" on a 1-10 scale) and free-form text fields to capture what she worked on, who she collaborated with, what she learned, and what she's proud of. We discuss how this creates both quantitative data you can graph over time and qualitative records you can mine for performance reviews, peer feedback, and interview preparation. We also explore the broader philosophy behind self-documentation, including how it helps combat the reality that we simply can't remember everything we do, the value of having "retro docs" when taking breaks from projects, and how documentation for yourself follows the same principles as documentation for users. Near the end of our conversation, Kate shares practical advice from her career coach about doing "scary hour" sessions with a friend to tackle procrastinated tasks. About Kate Pond: Kate Pond is a Seattle-based software engineer, technical storyteller, and former park ranger. With a background in both environmental education and backend engineering, she brings a systems-thinking approach to everything from documentation to distributed systems. Through her studio, The Pond’s Edge, Kate is building climate-tech and AI-powered tools that support sustainability and reduce waste—most recently focusing on circular economy solutions rooted in local community needs. Kate is passionate about making complex ideas accessible and mentoring others to grow as thoughtful technologists. She’s spoken at GopherCon, REdeploy, and SeaGL, and actively contributes to the PNW tech and climate communities through events like CascadiaJS and PNW Climate Week. Recommendation from Kate Pond: 9Zero Climate Innovation Hub is a coworking space and community designed for climate innovators—founders, engineers, scientists, creatives, and changemakers. With locations in San Francisco and Seattle, and expanding to NYC and Los Angeles, it’s a vibrant hub for events, collaboration, and climate-focused work. If you’re based in or near one of those cities and looking for a supportive, mission-driven space to work or connect, definitely check them out. ✨ Referral perk: If you sign up for a membership and mention my name (“Kate Pond”) as your referrer, we both get a free month (or up to $150 off). Win-win! Learn more at 9zero.com Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact Kate Pond:
Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Kate sounds off on small things and repairs | 13 nov. 2025 | 00:20:18 | |
In this solo episode, I talk about my latest content update progress. I also reflect on Dennis Dawson’s interview (S3:E22), the ways I'm already using Dennis's tips, and the power of doing small things or repairs to affect larger change. — I’ve continued my work to update the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base to align with major navigation and UI changes we rolled out in December 2024. My previous punchdown list of fewer than 50 articles was wrong, but I do think I’m below 100 now, after I found a chunk of content I’d completely missed. I reflect a bit on some of the detailed, specific next steps Dennis Dawson offered. Thanks to some of his points, I won’t be including a floating copy of my head in upcoming videos. I’m also starting to think of visual ways I can help give my readers a pause during conceptually-heavy content, to let them shift from focused mind to diffuse mind. I also reflect on the piece of advice that most stuck out to me from Dennis’s interview: “Get over yourself. Get over your reticence”, and a new practice I have of picking up trash along the main road near my house. Along the way, I tie in quotes from Abby Covert, Ari Weinzweig, and Harrison Gardner. So much of tech writing boils down to what we might classify as “small things” (Weinzweig) or “repairs” (Gardner). In both cases, these small actions can add up to big change and momentum over time. They’re also one of the ways we can most express care and commitment to a project. This month, I’m doubling down on these small things and repairs, and I invite you to join me in finding small ways to care for your documentation. Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Humor and visuals in technical writing with Dennis Dawson | 30 oct. 2025 | 00:52:48 | |
In this episode, I talk with Dennis Dawson, a technical writer with 40 years of experience who creates the sketchnotes for Write the Docs talks. We talk about how humor and visual elements can make documentation more engaging and memorable, the science behind why graphics help information stick in long-term memory, practical tools and techniques for adding visual content to your docs, and why you don't need to consider yourself an artist to create effective illustrations that enhance your documentation. — Dennis and I discuss his unconventional path into technical writing, starting with an English degree and progressing through roles as an editor, typist, secretary, and eventually desktop support in the early days of personal computing. His technical writing career began at startups in the 1980s, where he combined training and documentation work. Throughout his 40-year career, Dennis has consistently advocated for using humor and visual elements in documentation. Our conversation centers on the science behind why visual content and humor make documentation more effective. Dennis shares how reading Richard Mayer's Multimedia Learning and Barbara Oakley's books on learning validated many of his instinctive approaches. We explore concepts like how visual information sticks in long-term memory more easily than text, the importance of reducing cognitive load through strategic use of graphics, and how breaking up text with visuals gives readers' brains time to process information by switching between focused and diffuse modes of thinking. Dennis also discusses when to use graphics and shares examples like using whimsical robot characters to represent different software components. We dive into the practical side of creating visual content, including Dennis's collaborative approach of sketching ideas and working with design teams to polish them into professional graphics, and tools like Gimp, Inkscape, Keynote, and Google Slides that make visual creation accessible. Dennis emphasizes that you don't need to consider yourself an artist to create effective illustrations—the key is getting over your reticence and recognizing that drawing is a skill developed through practice, not innate talent. We also discuss his approach to creating educational videos, including using Doc Detective to automate video updates when UIs change. Throughout our conversation, Dennis stresses the importance of using visual humor and plain language to help make documentation digestible and accessible. About Dennis Dawson: Like many baby-boomers, Dennis still hasn't decided what he wants to be when he grows up. He's a technical writer with 40 years' experience in technical communications providing documentation, training, and user support; a sketchnotes artist for Write the Docs; a 3-time Distinguished Toastmaster and Past District 57 Governor who's won District Champion titles in Humorous, Tall Tales, and Evaluation contests; a volunteer Santa Claus at San Jose Christmas in the Park; and a volunteer drawing teacher at local elementary schools. Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact Dennis Dawson: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Kate sounds off on beliefs and maintenance work | 16 oct. 2025 | 00:19:23 | |
In this solo episode, I share an update on my content update progress. I also reflect on Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti’s interview (S3:E20) and the ways exploring models like his Seven-Action Documentation model have helped me interrogate my own beliefs about tech writing, the benefits of self-knowledge in becoming a better writer, and the ways that maintenance docs work helps me recharge. — I’ve continued my work to update the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base to align with major navigation and UI changes that we rolled out in December, and I’m finally nearing the light at the end of the tunnel: my initial punchdown list has less than 50 articles remaining! Along the way, I’ve also had to re-update docs I already updated as we rolled out more changes to existing features–ahhh, the life of a tech writer. In his interview, Fabri mentioned that part of his motivation for creating the Seven-Action Documentation model was a frustration that people were taking frameworks like Diátaxis and just rote-applying them to their documentation. We discovered some very deep common ground: that models and frameworks are useful because they help you, as a writer, surface and interrogate the deeply-held beliefs you have about technical writing. They’re tools for exploration rather than step-by-step guides on what to do. In my case, engaging with the Seven-Action Documentation model helped me realize how strongly I felt about appraisal and troubleshooting as user needs. While I’m not necessarily crafting new content templates to handle this, my site structure has naturally incorporated them, and I’m now exploring the idea of review checklists or user journeys that might help me assure that I’m handling all the user needs in some way. I’ve also been sick with Covid, which slowed down my velocity for more strategic, creative work and prompted me to return to a lot of maintenance work. Fabri mentioned that maintenance work helps him recharge, and I found the same thing. I often call maintenance work “productive procrastination”, since it’s not usually the single most important thing, but it is something I can do when my energy or focus are low so that I’m still improving my docs every day. Consider this your invitation to spend the next month paying attention to which writing tasks fill or drain your cup, what kinds of energy those tasks demand, and how you can better manage that moving forward. Resources discussed in this episode: Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Growing as a technical writer in the AI era with Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti | 02 oct. 2025 | 00:53:18 | |
In this episode, I talk with Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti about moving beyond strictly following documentation frameworks to embrace strategic thinking, his Seven-Action Documentation model that prioritizes user needs over content types, and how technical writers can grow and adapt in the AI era while positioning themselves as essential strategic partners. — Fabri and I discuss his background as a cognitive psychology student who transitioned into technical writing through his love of computers and writing. He shares his journey from academia to becoming an editor at Softonic, and eventually to his current role as a principal technical writer at Elastic working on OpenTelemetry documentation. We explore his concept of technical writers as shapeshifters who adapt to different roles and contexts. The conversation centers around Fabri's Seven-Action Documentation model, which he developed as a more descriptive and user-focused alternative to prescriptive documentation frameworks. Unlike content-type-focused approaches, his model identifies seven key user actions that address real user needs that are often overlooked by traditional frameworks. We discuss how this model encourages writers to think strategically about user needs rather than simply following rigid content templates, and why starting with user needs rather than content types leads to more effective documentation. We also explore professional growth for technical writers, particularly in the AI era. Fabri emphasizes the importance of meaningful skill growth, advocating for work that demonstrates strategic thinking rather than just high-volume output. He shares his philosophy of embracing AI as a tool while maintaining critical evaluation of its limitations, arguing that technical writers must understand emerging technologies to maintain credibility and influence in organizational decisions about documentation and AI implementation. About Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti: Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti is a technical writer and documentation engineer with over 15 years of experience. Through his blog Passo.uno, he shares insights on documentation strategy, API design, and the evolving role of writers in the tech industry. When not championing better documentation practices or contributing to open source projects like OpenTelemetry, he explores ways to make technology more accessible. Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Kate sounds off on docs as an act of service | 18 sept. 2025 | 00:20:39 | |
In this solo episode, I share an update on my content update progress. I also reflect on Sarah Walker’s interview (S3:E18) and the concepts of Asteya, giving great service, and going the extra mile. — I’ve continued my work to update the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base to align with major navigation and UI changes that we rolled out in December. I also created about 30 articles for the launch of KnowledgeOwl’s new Owl Analytics feature, taking my total to 618. 🎉 Sarah’s interview gave me a lot to think about, and I spent the bulk of this episode reflecting on some key points from that conversation. First, I focus on the concept of Asteya she shared, in the context of not stealing time and energy from other people. This concept is so central to well-written documentation and is a compelling argument in favor of clear, consistently applied style guidelines. I coined the phrase “Style guide adherence is an anti-theft device” to summarize this idea. Our conversation reminded me so much that creating great documentation is an act of giving great service. I outline the three-step guide to giving great service that KnowledgeOwl uses, which is based on Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service: 1) Find out what your customer wants; 2) Get it for them accurately, politely, and enthusiastically; 3) Go above and beyond, or go the extra mile. Step one is often the hardest piece of giving great service since people often don’t know how to articulate what they actually want. At KnowledgeOwl, we use Disney’s “What time is the 3 o’clock parade?” example to show our new support and success owls how what someone asks for isn’t necessarily the question they want answered. Great documentation helps deliver step two by creating the accurate answers your readers need. Step three ties very nicely back to statements Sarah and I both made—about the idea of crafting a solid experience for others in our documentation, of distilling what they need and making it as streamlined as possible. This discussion builds on the ideas of craft we’ve previously discussed, the idea of care I discussed in Episode 17, and Sarah’s comments about crafting something FOR others. Sharing knowledge is an inherent piece of our humanity and of building human communities. Documentation isn’t merely transactional—it’s also an act of care, a gift of time and knowledge, and a gift of saved time so people can pursue other interests. Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Yoga wisdom for technical writers with Sarah Walker | 04 sept. 2025 | 00:51:03 | |
In this episode, I talk with Sarah Walker, a technical writer and yoga instructor, about how yoga principles like establishing foundations, respecting people’s time, and embracing practice over perfection can transform your approach to technical writing and help you create more mindful, user-centered documentation. — Sarah and I discuss her path into technical writing, which began with yoga instructor training where she discovered how much she enjoyed breaking down complex processes into foundational steps. This experience taught her that effective instruction—whether for yoga poses or technical procedures—requires understanding your audience's needs and building from core principles. We explore how yoga's emphasis on establishing solid foundations directly translates to documentation, where starting with fundamental concepts helps both beginners learn and experienced users refresh their understanding. We explore the yoga principle of Asteya (non-stealing), particularly how it applies to respecting readers' time and attention. Sarah explains how this philosophy shapes her approach to writing clear, concise documentation that helps users efficiently get to their goals. We discuss practical applications like using consistent style guidelines to reduce cognitive load and being mindful of which content is essential to include in your docs. Our conversation also covers how yoga's concept of practice over perfection applies to technical writing careers. Sarah shares how documentation evolves alongside products and why embracing this constant change rather than striving for perfect static content leads to better outcomes. We explore the parallels between sequencing yoga poses and sequencing information in documentation, the importance of observing your audience's needs, and how both practices require patience, self-compassion, and continuous learning. About Sarah Walker: Sarah's been writing and crafting stories since she was able to put pencil to a Peanuts 3x5 top-spiral memo pad and record her stories in her own scribbly alphabet. Since personal alphabets scribbled on tiny pieces of paper don't pay the rent, she embarked on her career as a professional writer and editor after graduating from St. Edward's University (Austin, TX) in 1998. As an industry editor with Hoover's for roughly seven years, she covered biotech, pharmaceuticals, health care systems, venture capital, investment firms, and other sectors as a member of the Finance and Health Care editorial team. She earned her Austinite bone fides by getting hired by and, 18 months later, laid off by Dell, where she served as a technical editor for the Global Technical Training and Curriculum Team for products and software for consumers as well as small and midsize businesses. Thanks to the Great Recession and other market forces and personal demands, she bounced around a bit from writing and editing features, self-help book summaries, U.S. Pharmacopeia monographs, and other technical-ish content. She began her technical writing career in earnest at Libre Digital, where she spent much of the second decade of the 21st century documenting procedures for processing various magazine titles as well as a platform for book publishers to distribute their titles to digital marketplaces. After a two-year stint as the managing editor (and lone full-time, non-contract employee) of a local bimonthly magazine targeting affluent residents of "West Austin," at long last (in August 2020), Sarah landed a job that gave her the Technical Writer job title, and she's been writing about the Monetate platform ever since. Sarah's second career as a yoga instructor (and briefly a Pilates mat instructor) began in 2005, after she completed her 250-hour instructor training with Yoga Yoga (now defunct, just like the college in Santa Fe, NM that she attended for the first two years of her undergrad studies). She taught part-time until 2012, when primary job demands and other responsibilities forced her to give it up. Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact Sarah Walker: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Kate sounds off on cognitive capital and learning | 21 août 2025 | 00:21:38 | |
In this solo episode, I share an update on my content update progress. I also reflect on Manny Silva’s interview (S3:E14), Ryan Macklin’s interview (S3:E16), and Liz Argall’s interview (S3:E13) and the importance of learning even when we don't have explicit reasons to do so. — I’ve continued my work to update the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base to align with major navigation and UI changes that were rolled out in December. I updated an additional 15 articles since my last episode, taking my total to 565. 🎉This month’s velocity was a lot lower thanks to prepping for, teaching, and attending KnowledgeOwl’s July 2025 Summer Camp workshop series. While teaching the classes was fun, it also triggered a lot of issues with my chronic illness, so I finished the month quite depleted on every level. This made me think a lot about the ambient and acute stress Ryan and I discussed in relation to empathy advocacy, and about how all documentation makes demands on readers’ cognitive capital. I share five documentation techniques that helped me get use from docs when I was struggling the most cognitively:
I also reflect on how tricky it is to actually accommodate learning as a tech writer if I don’t have a pressing need for it. We learn new tools or domains often since it’s required. We learn new tooling or scripting to make our lives easier or because it’s required. We attend classes, conferences, or certifications. But we often don’t take time on less formal, bigger picture learning. I share how doing research to teach a class on style guides led me to find all kinds of flaws and oversights in my existing style guide. I challenge all of us to carve out 2-4 hours in the next month to dig deep on a best practice or concept we want to learn more about. If you lack the time or discipline and have a professional development budget, you can also consider joining me for the Information Architecture Master Class I’m teaching in partnership with KnowledgeOwl in September and October. Use discount code NOTBORING. Resources discussed in this episode: Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Empathy advocacy: Designing docs for all emotional states with Ryan Macklin | 07 août 2025 | 00:50:45 | |
Learn how Ryan Macklin's "empathy advocacy" framework helps you design documentation that works for users in all emotional states (e.g. anxious, frustrated, exhausted, and curious/distractible) rather than assuming everyone comes to your docs in a perfect state of clarity. — Ryan and I discuss his unique path into technical writing, starting from his early computer hacking days and role-playing game writing background. Ryan explains how writing and editing tabletop games taught him that documentation is harder than technical writing because it requires creating user interfaces for "disconnected, squishy brains" while making content engaging enough that users won't simply abandon it for alternatives. This experience, combined with his personal journey through therapy and understanding neurodiversity, eventually led him to develop the empathy advocacy framework. Our conversation centers around Ryan's empathy advocacy concept, which focuses on writing for users who aren’t calm. These users might be in four key cognitive states: anxious, frustrated, exhausted, and curious/distractible. Rather than designing documentation for the "happy path" or optimal users, Ryan advocates for considering people who may be dealing with high ambient stress, acute stress from urgent problems, cognitive depletion, or distractibility. The "stupid users" developers complain about are often just busy, stressed people whose brains aren't optimally processing information. We explore practical applications of empathy advocacy concepts, including strategic screenshot reduction to minimize cognitive load, restructuring and tightly scoping FAQs to avoid information architecture problems, and understanding that every element in documentation has a "tax" on your user’s mental energy. The episode also includes practical advice on social capital management, documentation stewardship, and the importance of "failing forward" rather than getting stuck in perfectionism. About Ryan Macklin: Ryan splits his cerebral time between tech writing, UXing, coding, and game design. By day, Ryan writes and edits software and hardware requirements. Otherwise, he works on game or tooling projects, light woodworking, and land improvement projects on his homestead in southern Michigan. Warning: Ask him about UX in games, and he may talk your ear off. Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact Ryan Macklin:
Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Kate sounds off on “good” documentation | 24 juil. 2025 | 00:23:32 | |
In this solo episode, I share an update on my content update progress. I also reflect on Nick Graziade’s interview (S3:E12) and Liz Argall’s interview (S3:E13) and the ways these interviews highlight some elements of "good" docs experiences. — I’ve continued my work to update the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base to align with major navigation and UI changes that were rolled out in December. I updated an additional 43 articles since my last episode, taking my total to 550. 🎉 I’m in the middle of updating our Contextual Help Widget documentation—one of the features I’ve been putting off updating—and I’ve been drafting content for our forthcoming AI Chatbot feature, too. Nick and I share a tech writer villain origin story of absolutely adoring LEGO documentation, and it’s gotten me curious how many other tech writers also have this early exposure to documentation. And for some reason I’m seeing tech writing everywhere. I share a detailed story of Bont Cycling’s online shoe fit guidance, which I recently used and which has created a fairly positive product experience for me. Good documentation experiences can help create good product experiences. I also reflect on Liz’s comment that “The best fertilizer is the gardener’s shadow.” She talked about this in the context of just showing up to work on docs, but I extend that metaphor to say showing up working with care. I gave two examples of this. I’ve been struggling with some personal losses, so a lot of my docs work lately has been a blitz of low-hanging docs fruit: a lot of small changes and improvements. None of these updates are substantive, but they’re good iterative improvements and they helped me get back into docs work. I also share a story of building a long-procrastinated-on bench for my entryway, which was more about accepting good rather than great just to get something built. Good docs are dynamic and iterative–they may not be perfect at first, but they’re constantly improving and always striving for a better reader experience. Resources discussed in this episode:
Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Docs as Tests: Keeping documentation resilient to product changes with Manny Silva | 10 juil. 2025 | 01:03:11 | |
In this episode, I'm talking with Manny Silva, a technical writer who created the "Docs as Tests" concept name and the open-source tool Doc Detective. We discuss how to automatically test your documentation for accuracy, why customer reports of broken docs are actually failed tests, and practical ways to implement automated documentation testing regardless of your tech stack. — Manny and I discuss his background as someone who intentionally chose technical writing as a career path, starting with early exposure to computers through his mother's work and developing into roles at Apple, Google, and now Skyflow as Head of Documentation. We explore the core concept behind Docs as Tests—that documentation contains testable assertions about how a product should work, and that customer reports of broken procedures are essentially failed tests that we should catch proactively rather than reactively. We dive deep into how Manny's strategy works in practice, from the "cupcake to wedding cake" approach of starting small and scaling up. We dig into two different approaches to the technical implementation: creating “detected” tests using Doc Detective, which reads the docs directly and uses them as tests, and creating standalone tests in testing tools like Playwright or Cypress, which you’d create and update independently of the docs. Manny explains how his Doc Detective tool can parse markdown documentation, automatically execute the steps described in procedures, capture screenshots for visual regression testing, and even validate API responses against OpenAPI schemas. We discuss the business case for automated documentation testing, including how it prevents customer frustration, builds trust, reduces support overhead, and can catch bugs before they reach production. Throughout our conversation, we explore practical implementation strategies, including how to sell the approach to stakeholders, integrate testing into CI/CD pipelines, handle multifactor authentication challenges, and work with QA teams. Manny also shares his philosophy of creating a "zero trust" relationship between docs and product—not out of disrespect, but to ensure everyone stays honest about the behavioral contract that documentation represents. Docs as Tests also encourages technical writers to embrace their unofficial QA role–as writers, we’re often the first to test a new feature or product, and embracing a Docs as Tests mindset can help legitimize and make visible this role. About Manny Silva: Technical writer by day, engineer by night, and father everywhere in between, Manny wears many (figurative) hats. He's passionate about intuitive and scalable developer experiences, and he likes diving into the deep end as the 0th user. Here are a few things that keep him busy:
He's always looking for collaborators on projects, and he loves chatting with folks, so don't hesitate to reach out. Resources discussed in this episode:
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| Connecting permaculture and documentation with Liz Argall | 26 juin 2025 | 00:45:52 | |
In this episode, I’m talking with Liz Argall, a writer I connected with at Write the Docs Portland 2025. We talk about working on open source projects, developing good qualitative metrics, her work with a permaculture nonprofit in Uganda, and the ways that being interviewed by a technical writer can make hidden expertise shine. — Liz and I presented in the same Lightning Talk session at Write the Docs Portland 2025 and subsequently discovered a shared love for spreadsheet tools, qualitative metrics, and permaculture. We discuss her work on Project Aria, a combination of hardware, software, and data collection geared toward solving the problems that augmented reality will need to address. Liz stresses the point of writing for poorly informed and/or sleep-deprived audiences. We also discuss the importance of qualitative metrics and some of Liz’s favorite qualitative metrics that help capture the story of the documentation, including impact and saving engineers’ and SMEs’ time. Liz also tells us about her involvement with Ngombor Community Development Alliance, a non-profit focusing on permaculture development in the West Nile region of Uganda. We also discuss how sometimes just showing up for something–including showing up to work on your docs–has far more impact than we realize. About Liz Argall: Liz Argall creates empowering documentation and processes; where you need it, when you need it. She’s a technical writer, program manager, author, and trainer who delivers humanizing, data informed, accessible, and technically complex projects for a range of organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to a community development organization in Uganda. In a past life, she was a professional artist talent scout and she’s still a professional member of SFWA (now called the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association). She’s a graduate of Clarion Writers Workshop, has been critiqued by multiple New York Times best selling authors, and has critiqued the stories of multiple award winning authors, which is a long way of saying that she likes to give a good portfolio critique! Resources discussed in this episode:
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| Documentation as a creative endeavor with Nick Graziade | 12 juin 2025 | 00:50:17 | |
In this episode, I'm talking with Nick Graziade, a technical writer and musician who approaches documentation as a creative endeavor. We explore how his early fascination with Lego instructions and synthesizer manuals shaped his philosophy that technical writing doesn't have to be dry or boring, but can be passionate and innovative work that adapts to different audiences and embraces impermanence. — Nick shares his two-part "villain origin story" that led him to technical writing. The first part involves his childhood fascination with Lego instructions, which taught him that visual documentation could guide complex building without narration. The second part comes from his music school experience with synthesizers, where he discovered that the best manuals—like those from Moog—don't just explain how to do something, but also why. This combination of visual clarity and deeper understanding became his template for approaching technical documentation. We dive deep into the concept of using different "grammars" for different audiences, drawing from Wittgenstein's language games. Nick emphasizes that effective technical communication requires understanding what assumptions you can make about your readers and adapting your language accordingly. We explore how consistency in style and formatting reduces cognitive load for users, and how deliberately breaking those patterns can create powerful contrast for important information like warnings or alerts. Throughout our conversation, Nick reflects on his philosophy of embracing impermanence in documentation. Rather than being frustrated by constant updates and revisions, he sees the evolving nature of technical writing as aligned with his Buddhist-influenced worldview. We discuss practical approaches to managing documentation workflows, including his use of quarterly revision cycles, just-in-time updates based on development sprints, and how he determines when something is "done enough" to move on to the next priority. About Nick Graziade: Nick is a Senior Technical Writer, instructional designer, knowledge management expert, musician, and philosopher from Upstate New York's Capital District. When not obsessing over the nuances of a web page's navigation sidebar, you can likely find him playing gigs as a professional bassist or practicing Japanese sword arts. Resources discussed in this episode:
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| Kate sounds off on Write the Docs | 29 mai 2025 | 00:26:51 | |
In this solo episode, I share an update on my content update progress. I also reflect on Sue Brandt’s interview (S3:E10) and on the Write the Docs Portland 2025 conference. — I’ve continued my work to update the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base to align with major navigation and UI changes that were rolled out in December. I updated an additional 50 articles since my last episode, taking my total to 507. 🎉Most of the updates this month were in our payment and plan-related documents, which needed to be updated for a new Billing page user interface and to include changes from migrating to a Merchant of Record. My velocity this month was lower thanks to teaching KnowledgeOwl’s Authoring 101 class and attending the Write the Docs Portland 2025 conference with Chad. Write the Docs is always a deeply inspiring conference for me, and this was my first time attending in person since 2019. This year, I even gave a lightning talk about dogs and docs, too! Much of the episode is spent reflecting on the six things I most love about Write the Docs, which include its support for first-time attendees and presenters, the flexibility and thoughtfulness of its design, and the amazing community of documentarians who form the backbone of this community. This year’s conference had a fantastic selection of talks and speakers, including several previous and upcoming podcast guests.
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We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| How to get hired as a tech writer with Sue Brandt | 15 mai 2025 | 00:41:25 | |
In this episode, I’m talking with Sue Brandt, a former Director of Documentation who’d hired around 60 people when we recorded the episode. We discuss practical strategies for technical writing job applications, what hiring managers are really looking for in resumes and interviews, and how to stand out in today’s competitive job market. — Sue and I discuss various aspects of the tech writing job application process, including resumes, cover letters, and interviews. Sue, who has hired around 60 people throughout her career, emphasizes that enthusiasm is often a key differentiator for candidates. Throughout the episode, Sue shares practical tips based on her experience managing tech writing teams of up to 30 people, including ways to stand out as an applicant, how to handle situations where you may not have the exact technical skills in a job description but can demonstrate transferable skills and a willingness to learn, resume and portfolio best practices, how to honestly address gaps in employment, and more. The episode concludes with a discussion of career transitions and the importance of being open to learning new things. About Sue Brandt Sue was educated as a biologist, did postdoc research into marine microorganisms, and named 13 new species! She moved a little closer to the tech field when she worked with computer scientists on a bioinformatics project and found herself in the role of "translator" between computer scientists and biologists. Her tech writing career unofficially started when someone looked over her shoulder when she was job searching and said "You could do that.” Sue worked as a Technical Writer at a UK startup for 3 years, then moved to Denmark and worked at Microsoft for 13 years as a Programming Writer and then Developer Documentation Manager. She was always adamant that she didn't want to be a manager, but she was persuaded to try it and found out she loved it! She became Director of Documentation at Sitecore and managed 30 writers, editors, and developers working on 10 different products in 6 countries. — Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky Contact Kate Mueller: Contact Sue Brandt: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Kate sounds off on knowledge sharing and docs stewardship | 01 mai 2025 | 00:16:18 | |
In this solo episode, I share an update on my content update progress. I also reflect on Marcia Riefer Johnston’s interview (S3:E8) and on the idea of docs stewardship as opposed to docs ownership. — I’ve continued my work to update the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base to align with major navigation and UI changes that were rolled out in December. I updated an additional 91 articles since my last episode, taking my total to 457. 🎉 I also reorganized another three Features subcategories, taking me to the milestone of having updated half those categories using content type-inspired information architecture. I also relocated 12 mice from my basement. Marcia’s episode prompted a lot of reflection for me. Her infectious, unbridled enthusiasm for this work—from learning new tools to new domains— reminded me of all the reasons I love the craft of technical writing, and how thankful I am that for the last year I’ve largely “only” been doing technical writing. I also appreciated Marcia’s exhortations to share what you know because you never know what great things will come from sharing your knowledge. Too often, we don’t share what we know because we don’t think we know “enough” (whatever that is). But sharing knowledge is a gift to others. Thanks to a conversation with a friend, I’ve started to come around to the idea of docs stewardship rather than docs ownership. “Stewardship” comes from the Old English words for house and guard. Stewards originally managed estates for medieval lords. I extend this into the world of documentation (doesn’t “Guardian of the Docs” sound like an awesome way to describe what we do? Maybe a swag idea, too, non?). Most modern definitions of stewardship include the idea of “careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care” (source), though they may also add sustainability, ethical use, or “a duty to protect and maintain assets which might be natural, financial, or informational” (source). Marcia’s observation that a lot of a tech writer’s job involves project and process management aligns with this approach, I believe. I explore some other ways I like this docs stewardship model and then draw a comparison between tech writers and gardeners. Resources discussed in this episode:
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| The craft of technical writing with Marcia Riefer Johnston | 17 avr. 2025 | 00:52:31 | |
In this episode, I’m talking with Marcia Riefer Johnston, a technical writer who’s worked in our industry for 40 years. We talk about how the profession has evolved since she first started in it, the grammar patterns that have helped her tighten up her writing, and how “creative” writing and “technical” writing are just different expressions of the craft of writing. — Marcia and I discuss how tech writing has evolved in the last 40 years as the tooling and field have evolved—from literally cutting and taping printed instructions together to using sophisticated content management systems and modular content. She shares the user feedback from her first set of technical instructions for using a remote control set-top box at Magnavox, highlighting how important user feedback is to help determine what needs to be documented. Throughout our conversation, we explore practical grammar techniques that have helped both Marcia and me strengthen our writing, such as restructuring sentences to center the reader rather than the tool. We also discuss how adding “by zombies” is a great way to suss out if you’re using passive voice (e.g. “This podcast is being listened to by zombies.”) and the strengths and weaknesses of the be verbs (am, is, are, was, were, be, being, etc.). We also talk about the value of sharing what you know, and how putting that knowledge out into the world can reap unexpected benefits. And we talk about the fact that the division between “creative ”writing and “technical” writing feels like a false binary: all acts of language are creative, and technical writing shares a lot of overlap with forms like poetry. We close by discussing how technical writers manage feedback from reviewers and explore how a significant percentage of technical writing involves project management skills such as managing conversations and helping everyone align on what the documentation should do. For both of us, handling contradictory feedback from reviewers usually involves having a larger conversation about what the problems or issues were, rather than only focusing on solutions. We theorize that part of the value tech writers bring is our ability to identify less-than-desirable user experiences and to not just take suggested edits as gospel but to question and explore the need for those edits. About Marcia Riefer Johnston Marcia’s loved tech writing from the time she first heard the words technical and writer together. These days she brings technical and writer together as a consultant for Baxter International. In 2013, she fulfilled a dream by writing her book Word Up! How to Write Powerful Sentences and Paragraphs (And Everything You Build from Them). Two years later, her pocket-sized collection came out: You Can Say That Again: 750 Redundant Phrases to Think Twice About. Occasionally she posts on her own blog at Writing.Rocks. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she makes things with scrumptious yarn, does New York Times crossword puzzles with her husband (especially the Thursday and Sunday puzzles), and lures in family and friends to play Wingspan and other games. Resources discussed in this episode:
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| Kate sounds off on mice and iterating | 03 avr. 2025 | 00:17:28 | |
In this solo episode, I share an update on my content update progress, muse about the similarities between mice infestations and docs projects, and reflect more on Kenzie Woodbridge’s interview (S3:E6) and how we choose what we work on. — Since Episode 5, I’ve continued my work to update the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base to align with major navigation and UI changes from December. I’ve now updated roughly 400 pages and reorganized a total of five Features subcategories (one more since Episode 5). Most of note this month: I overhauled our Search documentation. This work was necessary due to new search settings and major changes to the search configuration pages. It was also the first feature documentation I wrote at KnowledgeOwl in 2018, and I’ve mostly tried to make minor tweaks to it instead of massively updating it. Thanks to some very positive feedback on the content type-inspired reorganization I’ve been doing elsewhere, I was able to make some much better content organization and substance changes. I’m also battling a mouse infestation in my rented house, and I spent some time in this episode comparing that process to working on documentation projects. This leads me into ruminating on the ways we can try to make the world a better, more inclusive place. I’ve been including a lot of Kenzie’s suggestions in my style guide content updates in this audit:
I like the idea that, as content creators, content accessibility is well within our area even if we don’t feel qualified as experts in it. These accessibility areas are also solid best practices for content, information scent, wayfinding, and search engine optimization. I encourage you to try these or other small, iterative improvements that will make your docs a better place to be in the next month. Resources discussed in this episode:
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We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| We’re all responsible for content accessibility with Kenzie Woodbridge | 20 mars 2025 | 00:45:28 | |
In this episode, I’m talking with Kenzie Woodbridge, a documentarian and self-taught accessibility advocate. We talk about how feeling “not expert enough” is no reason to skip content accessibility, four ways you can make your content more accessible right now, and ways you can serve as an accessibility advocate as you review content and work with contributors. — Kenzie and I discuss why content accessibility is something we all need to think about as we create content. You don’t have to be an expert to improve your content’s accessibility. We discuss four areas you can focus on right now:
We also discuss some dos and don’ts with alt text, providing feedback to content contributors who aren’t following accessibility guidelines, tools or processes to help identify accessibility bugaboos in your content, and so much more. Check out the resource list below to sponge a ton of useful resources from Kenzie, too. About Kenzie Woodbridge Kenzie works at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) in British Columbia, Canada, as a Tech Writer, Trainer, and Knowledge Strategist, and is currently a co-chair of BCIT's Accessibility Committee. They have spoken about documentation and other topics at multiple technical conferences, including Write the Docs (their favourite). Kenzie is also a parent, a tuba player, chronically ill, a crafting dilettante, a gamer, and all around nerd who wrote their Master's thesis about prosocial community in multiplayer Minecraft. Kenzie is awesome and you totally want to have them as your friend (offer of friendship void where local laws do not permit, not guaranteed in all circumstances, skill-testing questions required). Resources discussed in this episode:
— Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team: We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky
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| Kate sounds off on docs hierarchy of needs and how we talk to ourselves | 06 mars 2025 | 00:17:07 | |
In this solo episode, I share an update on working with content types, muse about the idea of a Documentation Hierarchy of Needs, and reflect more on Janine Chan's interview (S3:E4) and how we talk to ourselves about being tech writers. — I may have overcommitted myself in Episode 3. I have been incorporating content type work into my massive content audit, but after working on four of the nineteen Features subcategories, I realized it was taking too much time and I had to refocus on my main task of updating content to match our UI and navigation releases. However, I like the information architecture decisions this has helped me make and the clarity it’s bringing to the docs themselves and how I organize them, so it’s a project I intend to continue. Making these kinds of priority decisions is something we all have to tackle all the time. But the content type work got me thinking: I’ve used an intuitive content type sense for a long time. I suspect I’m also using an intuitive decision-making framework for prioritizing my docs work. What would an explicit framework for that look like? In talking this over with a colleague, I realized I wanted a Documentation Hierarchy of Needs. I discovered that MongoDB created exactly this for their documentation overhaul once upon a time and wrote this blog post about it. I briefly run through their Hierarchy of Needs and how my decision to temporarily deprioritize content types might fit within it. I also reflect more on Janine Chan’s episode (S3:E4) and her point about reframing the way we talk to ourselves from “I’m not technical enough” to “I don’t know how to do this… yet.” And I share my own suggestion for handling that narrative problem. Resources discussed in this episode:
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| Bridging the gap from “not technical enough” to “technical” with Janine Chan | 20 févr. 2025 | 00:56:00 | |
In this episode, I’m talking with Janine Chan, a technical writer and Write the Docs community moderator. We talk about how feeling “not technical enough” is as much about attitude and approach as it is about knowledge and ways you can bridge the gap to a more technical future. — Janine and I discuss the fact that there’s no defined/established set of skills or training to become a technical writer. This lovely flexibility can also lead to a lot of imposter syndrome or feeling like you’re “not technical enough.” But through continuous lifelong learning, changing your attitude or the story you tell yourself, asking for help, and letting go of perfectionism, you can transition to a more empowered, technical version of yourself. Along the way we discuss the wonders of indoor plumbing, the fact that growing up to a be a tech writer isn’t typically on kids’ radar, our tendency to get curious when we’re frustrated about something, the importance of trying to answer a question before you seek help, how to be generous in requesting help, how generally awesome and generous with knowledge people are, how the experience of knowing little makes us more empathetic writers, and so so much more. About Janine Chan Janine is a technical writer based in Calgary, Canada. When she's not writing software documentation or shoehorning sociolinguistics into conversations, she's usually either outside, or hunkered down trying to make room in her lap for both a knitting project and her cat. (She recognizes that "not-boring" is a relative term.) You can find her on LinkedIn and the Write the Docs Slack, where her inboxes are always open for more tech writing chats! She promises she won't write in third person like she is now. Resources discussed in this episode: —
We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback: Contact Kate Mueller: Contact Janine: Contact KnowledgeOwl: Join the discussion by replying on Bluesky | |||
| Kate sounds off on content types | 06 févr. 2025 | 00:16:04 | |
In this solo episode, I share what I'm currently working on, reflect a little on teaching my first Knowledge Management Master Class with KnowledgeOwl, and dig into why and how I'm going to start using content types. — My current in-flight projects include updating nearly all of our documentation to reflect major changes to our user interface, which includes changes to screenshots, navigation options, and section/subsection labels. I’m also working on my long slog to convert all our screenshots from .png to .webp format. As I make all of those updates, I’m bringing our content into line with our current style guide (the first time I’ve used an explicit style guide in the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base). I recently finished teaching my first Knowledge Management Master Class with KnowledgeOwl. This was mostly a success, though it was a sharp learning curve for me and I’m already full of ideas on what to do differently next time. It also humbled me since it made me view my own docs through the lens of all the best practices I was suggesting people employ–and realizing how often my docs fell short. For me, the most fascinating takeaway was really digging into the concept of concept types or information typing. I’ve never done this as an explicit, intentional exercise. After researching various approaches, I’m sold on the underlying concept. My plan is to create some templates for each major content type, using The Good Docs Project’s templates as a starting point). I’m then going to use those templates as I update content in our Features category to test and refine the templates before gradually applying them to the entire knowledge base. I’ll be using tags to track my progress and identify the content type for each page, too. In Episode 5, I’ll report back on how I’m doing in my endeavors! Resources discussed in this episode:
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| Developer collaboration with Lorna Mitchell | 23 janv. 2025 | 00:43:46 | |
In this episode, I’m talking with Lorna Mitchell, a technology leader, published author, tech blogger, and developer experience expert who is passionate about APIs and developer tools. We talk about why developers writing docs is good for both your devs and your docs, the best ways to build successful collaboration with developers, and more! — Lorna and I discuss her background as a developer who started doing documentation for her own resources and gradually moved into developer relations, developer advocacy, and developer experience. We chat about the wide range of writing she’s tackled–including books, readmes, and her blog–and why developers need to write to improve their skills. We also discuss strategies tech writers can use to facilitate good collaboration with developers, including treating their role more as editors rather than writers; having a clearly-defined process with discrete, well-scoped requests for contributions; creating content type templates to streamline contributions; and having a second, shorter style guide for developers. About Lorna Mitchell: Lorna is based in Yorkshire, UK; she is a technology leader and developer experience expert who is passionate about APIs and developer tools. She is also a published author and regular blogger, sharing her insights on a variety of tech-related topics. Lorna serves on the OpenUK board, is on the Technical Steering Committee for OpenAPI specification, and maintains open source projects. Resources discussed in this episode:
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Contact Kate Mueller: Contact Lorna Mitchell: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Introducing The Not-Boring Tech Writer Reboot | 09 janv. 2025 | 00:12:46 | |
Meet our new host Kate Mueller and get the inside scoop on how The Not-Boring Tech Writer (TNBTW) will work moving forward. — Kate Mueller is the Documentation Goddess of KnowledgeOwl, a seasoned technical writer and owner of knowledgewithsass, a knowledge management coaching service. She’s written and maintained documentation for companies in broadcasting, financial services, IT, and software for 15+ years. She’ll be hosting TNBTW moving forward. In this episode, Kate discusses her vision for TNBTW: a podcast dedicated to everyone who is writing technical documentation, including those who may not feel comfortable calling themselves tech writers. Whether you create product documentation, support documentation, READMEs, or any other technical content—and whether you deal with imposter syndrome, lack formal training, or find yourself somewhere in the gray area between technical communications and general writing—the TNBTW reboot might be your new favorite podcast. Kate talks about her own imposter syndrome using the tech writer label and recounts her tech writer villain origin story. We plan to release two episodes per month: one episode will maintain the traditional TNBTW format of interviewing a guest and focusing on useful skills or tools that can help you improve your tech writing skills; the other episode will be a behind-the-scenes look into what Kate’s working on, struggling with, or thinking about in her daily tech writing life. —
Contact Kate Mueller: Contact KnowledgeOwl: | |||
| Tech Writer Advocacy and Managing Write the Docs with Swapnil Ogale | 14 juin 2021 | 00:37:31 | |
In this episode I’m talking to Swapnil Ogale, a Technical Writer Advocate for Redocly based in Melbourne, Australia, who is also a Community and Conference Manager for Write the Docs. He gives us the inside scoop on arranging Write the Docs events conferences both in-person and online, and talks to us about the importance of advocacy for technical writers. | |||
| Documentarians for Diplomacy: Bringing the Mirth with Kat Stoica Ostenfeld | 07 mai 2021 | 00:50:44 | |
We’re back after a short and unexpected break! Sorry to keep you waiting! This episode you’ll hear Kat Stoica Ostenfeld, an accomplished tech writer living in Copenhagen in Denmark. A linguist by credential, she says diplomacy is the key to being an effective documentarian, and shares how her translation and applied linguistics background helped her find common understanding and success in the world of technical writing. Additional topics: Beautiful limestone buildings; puppy chat; spouse sacrifices; documentation as its own pillar; language proficiency vs successful communication; the meaning of “documentation”; linguistics applied; the diplomacy of being a tech writer; full stack teams; writing rage; linguistic detective work. The Not-Boring Tech Writer - feedback survey Twitter - Kat Stoica Ostenfeld | |||
| Marrying skillsets and existential googling with Caity Cronkhite | 19 mars 2021 | 00:36:12 | |
In this episode, I’m excited to be speaking to Caity Cronkhite, Seattle-based founder and CEO of Good Words LLC. We talk about her experience of starting up as a tech writer both in-house and freelancing, before starting and growing her own successful business in the technical writing industry, and the successes and struggles of operating Good Words LLC in these strange and unpredictable pandemic times. Additional topics: U-Haul montage; Something Big and Impactful; (not) going the way of the startup; nurturing your network; adult, painstaking colouring. Read the full transcript for this episode here. | |||
| How to Infiltrate a Hackathon in Iowa with Philip Kiely | 16 févr. 2021 | 00:46:23 | |
In such a complex and fast-moving industry as tech writing, it can be interesting to see how burgeoning tech writers get started - and become successful. Enter Philip Kiely, author of Writing for Software Developers and owner of PK&C, the world's smallest conglomerate. He graduated from Grinnell College in May 2020 with a degree in computer science, and has only gone onwards and upwards from there! This week I speak to Philip about being a new(-ish) entrant to the tech writing game, becoming a first-time author of a successful book, adventures during his time studying abroad in Budapest, Hungary, and how he managed to infiltrate a hackathon in Iowa during a blizzard! Read the full transcript for this episode. Show notes: | |||
| A Fond Farewell (Yet Warm Welcome!) | 03 janv. 2021 | 01:22:13 | |
After four exciting years hosting The Not-Boring Tech Writer—the podcast that gives listeners the skills to break the stereotype that technical writing is a boring career—I’ve passed the podcast along to longtime sponsor KnowledgeOwl, a knowledge base software company. This sobers me, admittedly: What began as a medium to connect with colleagues whom I’ve admired since university gradually become a resource for new and seasoned technical writers alike to learn the skills they need to break the stereotype that technical writing a boring career. Now, as I begin a new career, KnowledgeOwl—who, as you’ll learn in this episode, has a relentless commitment to supporting the technical writing—will ensure the philosophy you’ve impressively fostered through this podcast continues. In this episode, Chief Executive Owl at KnowledgeOwl Marybeth, joins the podcast to share her vision for the podcast. In addition, upcoming host and KnowledgeOwl employee Jerrard Doran joins to share how he’ll further the philosophy while adding his own unique approach. Thanks, all, for your support of The Not-Boring Tech Writer—and hope you enjoy this episode. | |||
| Skill #36: Creating Usability Tests for Your Organization | 03 nov. 2020 | 00:46:42 | |
Technical writers must ensure their help resources, such as documentation and video tutorials, are useful for their users. Therefore, they study language, design, and Support tickets—gathering all the context they need to ensure users can accomplish their task. But get this: Through feedback loops such as quizzes and interviews with subject matter experts, you can create usability tests that transform the way in which you measure the effectiveness of your documentation. That’s why in this episode, we have Mariana Moreira on the podcast: Technical Writer at Zup Innovation and Community Manager of Brazil’s budding technical comm community, Tech Writing BR. Joining us, as well is Jerrard Doran at KnowledgeOwl—longtime sponsor of The Not-Boring Tech Writer—to discuss usability tests from a knowledge base software company’s perspective, as well. In this episode, you’ll learn everything you need to know to begin creating usability tests for your organization. Show notes: | |||
| Skill #35: Understanding Basic Design Principles | 30 sept. 2020 | 00:40:30 | |
Technical communicators wield the power of plain language to ensure their readers find and understand the information they need to complete a task—no matter how complex. Basic design principles, such as alignment, contrast, and other principles you’ll learn in this episode, give your documentation that extra lift it needs to engage readers throughout your documentation. That’s why in this episode, we have Laci Kettavong on the podcast: Marketing and Member Coordinator at Stoke, a coworking space based in Denton, Texas—and also a former technical communicator in both industry and academia, deploying design principles for several different mediums. Joining us, as well is Jerrard Dorran at KnowledgeOwl—longtime sponsor of The Not-Boring Tech Writer—to discuss design principles from a knowledge base software company’s perspective, as well. In this episode, you’ll learn everything you need to know to begin using basic design principles in your documentation. Show notes: | |||
| Skill #34: Crowdsourcing Technical Communication | 27 févr. 2020 | 00:37:04 | |
Folk working in technical communication—whether they’re academics or practitioners—through their own unique skill sets, perspectives, and experiences, often discover best practices to excel at their job. These hard-earned insights would likely benefit others facing similar challenges; however, silos often keep folk in technical communication from quickly disseminating what they’ve learned. That’s why Dr. Chris Lam—technical communication professor at the University of North Texas—created CrowdsourceTPC: a crowdsource platform that gives folk in technical communication and opportunity to share their insights and little wins—giving others an opportunity to use and adapt them for their own needs. In this episode, Chris joins us on the podcast to discuss the inspiration behind CrowdsourceTPC and how others can make the most of the platform. Show notes: | |||
| Skill #33: Getting Started with Open Data | 10 févr. 2020 | 00:43:26 | |
For the civically-mind technical writer, there’s a growing movement in cities across the world where technical writers can use their skills to better their community. It’s called Open Data Day: an annual celebration of open data groups around the world partnering with local governments to use open data to achieve a shared goal in the community. From analyzing environment data to tracking public money flows, open data day gives citizens—from data folk to advocates—an opportunity to get the data they need to take action in their communities. As a tech writer, you may not initially see how your skills fit into open data. However, as you’ll learn in this episode, success open data day’s need compelling narratives to complement outcomes, tutorials to teach people how to access the data for their own uses, and much more—all areas in which the tech writer succeeds. That’s why, in this episode, I have Jesse Hamner and two-time guest on the podcast—longtime open data advocates who’ve seen first-hand the value of the tech writer. In this episode, Jesse and Kyle help us understand the value of open data and how the civically-minded technical writer can get plugged into this exciting movement. Show notes: | |||