In this solo episode, I share my latest progress on content updates and reflect on my takeaways from Sharon Burton’s interview (S3:E48). I share some thoughts on the importance of curiosity in our industry and the ways that AI usage can feel like managing others (and why I’m bad at that).

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This month I got another dozen or so article editor pages updated. My article editor punchdown list is now somewhere between 50-60 articles remaining. More importantly, I finally finished the Microsoft Teams app docs and the App Store submission for that app, including recording a short explainer video. The Wisdom Wednesday sessions I’ve been leading have prompted a lot of docs work, too. My session on optimizing search had me digging deep into the ways that our search combines keyword and semantic search, which our current documentation didn’t at all address. I did a first pass at updating those docs based on my research, but they likely still need more work. I’m also making updates to our documentation on different login and authentication options as I prep for that session.

I also reflect on my interview with Sharon Burton and the book she edited, Women in Technical Communication. I need to learn more about our own history, as my technical writing knowledge is very heavily skewed toward the last decade. Sharon’s passion for capturing and sharing women’s stories in our field is palpable, and she’s really embracing that role. I especially appreciated her focus on how curiosity isn’t teachable but is so essential to being successful as a tech writer. While I may have uncertainty about my own place in the field, I have no uncertainty about my own curiosity.

In the episode, Sharon and I spent quite some time discussing the ways she used AI to vibe code some automation scripts in Google Drive to make managing contributions from over 60 writers more manageable, and how this helped her manage some very tedious, unenjoyable tasks so she could focus on the pieces she enjoyed more. This mirrors my own preference for using AI in my work: automating things I don’t like or that are tedious. But a lot of the folks I know using it heavily are basically turning into AI managers, and I spend some time musing on that and the fact that I hate being a manager. Perhaps this explains much of my resistance to using AI; who knows?

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