Tech Writing 101 for SREs

Lisa Carey, Google

Abstract: 

From post-mortems to operations manuals to code comments, writing things down for others is an unavoidable part of the life of an SRE.

In this workshop, you’ll learn writing principles to help you present technical information from two experienced Google technical writers—and each other! Through a series of pair-work exercises you’ll work through a variety of topics to improve the clarity, readability, and effectiveness of your writing, and possibly think about a toothbrush like you’ve never thought about one before. If you've never before taken any technical writing training, this workshop is perfect for you. If you've taken technical writing training, this class will serve as a great refresher.

There is a small amount of pre-reading for participants in this workshop (~30 minutes of reading about basic technical writing concepts).

The workshop runs for approximately two hours with a short break.

Pre-Reading List:

https://lisafc.github.io/tw101-reading/

Prerequisites, Skills, and Tools:

This class is suitable for all conference attendees.

Lisa Carey, Google

Lisa Carey is a Technical Writer for Google Cloud Platform in Dublin. She has written documentation for many technologies including Protocol Buffers, gRPC, Istio, and Cloud APIs, and regularly runs writing workshops for Google engineers. She holds degrees from Trinity College Dublin.

BibTeX
@conference {212977,
author = {Lisa Carey},
title = {Tech Writing 101 for {SREs}},
year = {2018},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}