Hacker News with Generative AI: Technical Writing

Teach, Don't Tell (2013) (stevelosh.com)
The purpose of technical documentation is to take someone who has never seen your project, teach them to be an expert user of it, and support them once they become an expert.

Technical Writing, Documentation, Education, Software Development

212 points by Tomte 17 days ago | 75 comments

Rules I Learned About Technical Writing (thecoder.cafe)
As you may know, in 2022, I published my first (and last) book, 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them. While I had already been maintaining a technical blog for more than a decade, I learned a ton during this experience. Here are ten rules I learned about technical writing while writing my book.

Technical Writing, Programming, Books, Go

9 points by mooreds 35 days ago | 0 comments

The Seven-Action Documentation Model (passo.uno)
I think all technical writers, at some point or another, feel the urge to base their work on something more systematic than “it’s just the way folks documented stuff since forever”. Toolkits and frameworks provide content types, which is immensely valuable when you know what you want to write, but starting from there is like buying a hammer without knowing that half of the work you’ll do is turning screws.

Technical Writing, Documentation, Software Development, Frameworks

96 points by remoquete 83 days ago | 10 comments

Oral History of Caroline Rose, Writer of Inside Macintosh (ycombinator.com)
Caroline Rose was a technical writer at Apple from 1982, lead writer and editor of "Inside Macintosh".

Oral History, Apple, Technical Writing, Macintosh

14 points by msephton 89 days ago | 4 comments

Myst Markdown – Markdown for technical/scientific document (mystmd.org)
MyST is an ecosystem of open-source, community-driven tools designed to revolutionize scientific communication.

Markdown, Technical Writing, Scientific Communication, Open Source

195 points by gmgn 90 days ago | 43 comments

Why your team needs a Technical Writer to manage your documentation (momorell.com)

Technical Writing, Documentation, Software Development, Teams

9 points by mooreds 95 days ago | 1 comments

Making Screenshots of Test Equipment Old and New (tomverbeure.github.io)
Last year, I create Fake Parallel Printer, a tool to capture the output of the parallel printer port of old-ish test equipment so that it can be converted into screenshots for blog posts etc.

Software, Hardware, Retro Computing, Screenshots, Technical Writing

134 points by zdw 123 days ago | 26 comments

Your docs are your infrastructure (stackoverflow.blog)
Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti, who spent many years as a technical writer for Splunk and New Relic, joins Ben and Ryan for a conversation about the evolving role of documentation in software development.

Technical Writing, Software Development, Documentation

25 points by runos 127 days ago | 18 comments

Embeddings are underrated (technicalwriting.dev)
Machine learning (ML) has the potential to advance the state of the art in technical writing. No, I’m not talking about text generation models like Claude, Gemini, LLaMa, GPT, etc. The ML technology that might end up having the biggest impact on technical writing is embeddings.

Machine Learning, Technical Writing, Embeddings

367 points by misonic 152 days ago | 176 comments

What docs-as-code means (passo.uno)
I’ve recently started a new job as a documentation engineer. While my work is largely the same as that of a technical writer, the sound and semantics of my new job title gave me some pause and made me think about what it really means to be doing docs-as-code. To say that it’s about writing documentation using the same tools and methods as software developers is correct, but fails to acknowledge the full consequences of the fact.

Software Development, Documentation, Technical Writing, Workflow

102 points by remoquete 164 days ago | 113 comments

Focus on decisions, not tasks (technicalwriting.dev)
In technical communication, we don’t talk much about decision support; we talk about task support… In many cases, the information people need to complete their tasks is not information on how to operate machines, but information to support their decision making… simply documenting the procedures is never enough… What I am talking about is documenting the context, letting users know what decisions they must make, making them aware of the consequences, and, as far as possible, leading them to resources

Technical Writing, Decision Making, User Experience

298 points by kaycebasques 166 days ago | 61 comments

I Landed 4 Jobs and Earned $25K+ with Technical Writing (catalins.tech)
As a final-year university student preparing to enter the industry, I knew I had to differentiate myself from other candidates in a competitive job market. That's when the idea struck me: what if I combined two activities I enjoy, programming and writing?

Technical Writing, Career Advice, Job Hunting, Programming

20 points by caminmccluskey 174 days ago | 2 comments

LaTeX Style Guide for EE 364B [pdf] (2014) (web.stanford.edu)

LaTeX, Technical Writing, Stanford University, EE 364B, Course Materials

120 points by walterbell 178 days ago | 31 comments

Technical writing is too important to leave to language models (counting-stuff.com)
There are no shortcuts to writing something worth reading

Technical Writing, Language Models, Artificial Intelligence

16 points by articsputnik 193 days ago | 0 comments

Ask HN: Technical Writing Resources (ycombinator.com)

Technical Writing, Resources, Writing, Ask HN

11 points by stevenking86 225 days ago | 5 comments

There is no mystery over who wrote the Blue Screen of Death (microsoft.com)