Last week I talked about technical writing as a role, and I figured I’d run with that theme for a minute. One of the things I mentioned was that we tend to write in other formats, and I wanted to expand on that – if you’re used to a “What You See is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) system like Microsoft Word or a Rich Text Format (RTF), or online editors, you might not think about writing formats much – if you want something bold, you click the bold button. The format is how that bold is represented under the hood. (This is related to, but slightly different from a file type – you can have multiple file types that actually use the same format behind the scenes, but are saved as a different type of file for various reasons.)
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On Technical Writing
I don’t talk about my day job all that often. What I’m doing currently is software development – specifically, I write tools and create infrastructure for a documentation team. This ranges from writing deployment pipelines and build scripts to writing extensions for the writing software we use, to building out sites and wrangling server configurations. I enjoy it, and I like that the role is broad, where what exactly I’m working on can vary a lot from day to day, depending on what needs to take priority. Prior to my current role, however, I was a technical writer – one of the folks writing the docs, and I wanted to talk about that a bit, as I think it’s a great role that I think a lot of folks might overlook.
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