2021-01-27: Technical Writing One Session

Following the discussion about Google’s free technical writing courses, here is information about joining the next Technical Writing One course today.

Pre-class Google has developed some materials to work through on your own, before you join the live class. Click here to find and work through the materials. This should take 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

Who should take this course? Anyone in the community who wants to improve their technical writing skills. If you are a software engineer, a computer science student, or have an engineering-adjacent role (such as product manager), then this course are for you! No registration is necessary.

What Technical Writing One , which covers the critical basics of technical writing.

When: January 27, 2021 at 10pm Kampala| 7pm UTC | 2pm Boston | 11am Seattle

Where: Click here to join class.

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Thanks Jen! I’ll be there.

@jennifer Thanks so much for always striving to ensure we build on our skills. I forgot to register but I promise to attend the training.

@jwnasambu, no need to register! And if you can’t make today’s session (like me), there’s another one in a couple of weeks. It’s great that there are also pre-class materials that we can do on our own time, before the class.

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That was a good session. They paired us up with a partner and we practiced a number of scenarios.

@gracebish it was nice to see you on the call at the same time (the 2 Graces representing!) - what did you think of it?

Resources Discovered

  • @jennifer - after the teaching session they had a small Q&A session. I explained OpenMRS & our Tech Writing / Documentation team. Nicola Yap offered to help answer our questions any time; she was one of the main facilitators and is a technical writer at Google.
  • Nicola also recommended we follow the Slack group for Write the Docs, which has a 12,000+ membership of technical writers. I think one of our GSOC students had mentioned this as well but it fell off my radar. Their slack group actually has a specific channel for #community-help-wanted
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I got to work with a software engineer from Splunk working on Kubernetes. For example, one of the assignments we worked through was to summarize the project you’re working on in language the the partner could understand. Here’s what he wrote about Kubernetes, I found this nice for someone at my level:

"Kubernetes is a popular open source technology for orchestrating containers. Key benefits of using Kubernetes include:

  • Simplified deployment and lifecycle management of containerized applications
  • Consistent interface for software developers to build applications
  • Ease of scaling the application when the load grows

An example of this simplification is that when running on Kubernetes, the developer need not worry about which Operating System is being used or which machine it is running on.

Kubernetes is like a maestro in the symphony, managing different resources in the system seamlessly and providing harmonious output."

You can see how we were practicing shorter sentences and lists.

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Am glad though I and @dkayiwa had a connection problem but we were able to join. Hopefully next time we shall make it on time.

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@grace it was such a blessing to me to participate. This should be promoted to other members as well. The lessons are very practical, thanks to Google. Thanks to @jwnasambu, @isamanya, @dkayiwa and other members who made time to attend. I believe we shall have such a vibrant documentation team this year.

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So glad that so many from our community were able to attend! I hope to make the next one.

Did any of you do the pre-class work? If so, would you recommend it?

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Yes, i did. It was very helpful.