From docs to engineering and back again¶
| Authors: | Susan Salituro |
|---|---|
| Time: | 9:20 - 9:40 |
| Session: | http://docs.writethedocs.org/2014/na/talks/#susan-salituro-from-docs-to-engineering-and-back-again |
| Link: |
Currently a software infrastructure engineer at Pixar, but over the course of her career she’s gone back and forth between engineering and writing. Last year’s WTD inspired her; finally, a group of people who care about the things she cares about: communicating with others more effectively.
As a self described introvert, Susan didn’t realize until after she’d submitted her talk that she was effectively committing to telling her professional autobiography in front of 300 people. At Pixar they say “the story is king”. So what’s the story?
Entering college, Susan loved astronomy, and wanted to be a astrophysicist. But eventually left the program, because she wasn’t sure she could complete the degree. But she did enjoy math, so she became a math major. And then added an English major to that. And as she considered what career she might pursue, she took the single technical writing course offered by her university. It was more geared toward graduate students trying to write their thesis and dissertations (don’t use passive voice, etc), but suddenly she understood that there was a way for her to combine both of her interests.
Over the next eleven years, Susan pursued technical writing, and got a lot out of it. There was a sense of community around technical writing, and a sense of passion shared by the community that was appealing. As a technical writer, there was also a continued sense of learning and beginner’s mind: your job is to communicate about your product to people who haven’t experienced it yet. And finally, there was a lot of flexibility: it’s a portable skill that Susan has been able to practice around North America.
But it felt like something was missing: Susan started exploring ways to grow her career. She started seeing technical writers applying their skills to UI design, information architecture, and programming. She visited customer sites with a UI designer, and had the opportunity to see customers actually using her help, which was sort of revelatory. “How can I help the UI team make the application so intuitive that my help content isn’t needed?” And she started learning about how software is put together, taking a class in Visual Basic so she could prototype interfaces, and a class in Java Doc, which exposed her to the a world she didn’t know existed.
While working at Palm Source, a manager took a chance on her and she was able to dive into documenting the API of one of PalmOS’s components. After moving on to Pixar, she was working on a documentation project that used DITA, an XML based documentation system. To do this effectively, she had to really expand her skills: XSLT, Python to drive it, Make to automate those. She was a programmer.
“You can’t go around writing software without attracting attention.”
Susan attracted the attention of the software release engineering team’s manager. And this was like drinking from the firehose: there was so much information being thrown at her, she could barely keep up.
And the community was still there, but instead of coming in the form of professional organizations, it came from the company internally. There wasn’t as much flexibility as there was with technical writing; you were almost always on call. But it was really difficult.
Susan moved from Pixar to a smaller company, into an information architecture role. This allowed her to combine her technical writing and programming skills. Unfortunately the company went bankrupt, and Susan returned to California, to Pixar. At Pixar she became a Software Infrastructure Engineer in documentation, further blending her techincal writing and software engineering. Her mandate was to find solutions for documentation problems, addressings both tools and process issues. But the focus still shifted to product life cycle, as opposed to writing.
This isn’t the end of the road. There’s still more to learn – for both Susan and you [in the audience]. Find a community, take a risk, make a choice.