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.

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I partnered with Sue, one of our developers, on an Okta SCIM integration project, doing some of the integration testing and creating the documentation so we could submit our integration to the Okta Integration Network. I made some article editor docs updates, but we released a number of new editor features and further interface changes, particularly to the versions functionality, so I’ll have a lot of new work and revisiting already-updated pages in my future. I’ve been battling burnout on the article editor docs, so I decided it was time for a little productive procrastination. This time, I decided to review our usage of Prism for code syntax highlighting and discovered it had new plugins we didn’t have, so I upgraded our installation, wrote docs on how to do that, and tested using a new plugin to load code blocks directly from files, which looks like it will streamline a lot of redundant work on my side!

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:

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