Last week, I did separate walk-throughs with two writers. My intention was to gain insight into the issues a typical user might encounter, and to use that information to improve the “getting started” repo I had created. I helped them install, configure, and start using Vale on their systems. Installing Vale by using brew wasContinue reading “Vale notes #3: Things start rolling”
Category Archives: technical writing
Vale notes #2: Talk to experts and stakeholders
In addition to eating my own dogfood, I started finding and talking to experts and stakeholders. For experts, I went to folks inside and outside Red Hat. At Red Hat, I talked to Fabrice Flore-Thebault and Yana Hontyk. Last year, they presented on using Vale with their documentation sets: Eclipse Che and CodeReady Workspaces. IContinue reading “Vale notes #2: Talk to experts and stakeholders”
Vale notes #1: Eating my dog food
I’ve heard complaints about the peer review process at a variety of organizations where I’ve seen it in use. To simplify, they sound like this: Writers: When I fix a set of issues and resubmit the PR, the reviewer(s) come up with a new set of issues. Reviewers: I keep flagging the same set ofContinue reading “Vale notes #1: Eating my dog food”
Git rid of old branches :-)
Every so often, I clean up old working branches I don’t need any more. After I’ve written or revised content, and the pull request has been merged from my fork of the repo into the main branch of the organization’s repo, it’s time to get rid of the old working branches. TLDR/Copy and paste Here’sContinue reading “Git rid of old branches :-)”
Job aid: Git cherry-pick a commit and manually resolve a conflict
This post is short version of Git: Cherry-pick a commit into a branch and resolve a merge conflict. Replace `upstream/enterprise-4.8` with whatever your target branch is. I copy/paste these commands into my terminal. Verify that “Your branch is up to date with ‘upstream/enterprise-4.8’.” Go to the pull request that has the merge failure (e.g., like thisContinue reading “Job aid: Git cherry-pick a commit and manually resolve a conflict”
Saving Lives With Checklists | Heroic Technical Writing: Advice and Insights on the Business of Technical Communication
checklists serve the following functions. Act as memory guide. Ensure that all critical actions are taken. Reduce variability between pilots. Enhance coordination during high workload and stressful conditions. Saving Lives With Checklists | Heroic Technical Writing: Advice and Insights on the Business of Technical Communication
Git: Cherry-pick a commit into a branch and resolve a merge conflict
Here’s the merge conflict message our merge master got when she tried to cherry pick my pull request (PR) to version 4.7 of the published OpenShift docs (lines , below). Here, I start by deleting the enterprise-4.7 branch (line ) because it had a previous unmerged commit sitting at the top of the pile. (InContinue reading “Git: Cherry-pick a commit into a branch and resolve a merge conflict”
WordPress bug with highlighting lines in a code block
I discovered a bug. When you use the highlight lines property for code blocks as shown here… …the highlighting for the higher line numbers gets confused, as shown with lines 27, 39, 60 in the following screenshot. I’ve reached out to WordPress support and will let you know how it goes. I’ll try to fileContinue reading “WordPress bug with highlighting lines in a code block”
Just as wild animals follow patterns that allow them to find adequate nutrition with the minimum expenditure of calories, information seekers follow patterns that allow them to find adequate information with the minimum expenditure of mental energy. Mark baker, Every Page is Page One
How I create my to-do list in todoist
Recently, I wrote about zero inbox, my hack for getting rid of email stress and mess. I also mentioned that it depends on having a to-do list that can link back to your email messages. A few years ago, I started using the free version of Todoist, an elegant and dependable app developed by a Germany-basedContinue reading “How I create my to-do list in todoist”
