The blog contains . . . everything. Quick references, miscellaneous tutorials, conference notes, and so on. It's a blog as brain with a tech focus. For many of the posts, I am the primary intended audience: the blog is there so I can quickly look up things I need. Others are more tutorial-like, or designed to answer quick questions. The writing style is generally informal, and closer to natural language than I'd use in documentation.
Decisions in a short doc
An insight into the number of decisions a tech writer makes, even in a short document.
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Become a tech writer: a quickstart guide
In the spirit of a code quickstart, this is a quick, opinionated, description of one possible tech writing learning path.
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How to avoid being doxxed: protecting your personal information online
How to protect your personal information online, and a few related internet survival tips.
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This post is a response to an article a friend, Adeline Amar sent to me: Spiky point of view: Let’s get a little controversial by Wes Cao.
I found the article intriguing: lots of good stuff in it, but wrapped in language that didn't really fit the core arguments and examples. I want to dig into what 'spiky' is doing here, try and extract Cao's main point, and look at the value it brings.
The Material theme for the MkDocs static site generator has a Status feature. You can use frontmatter to mark a page as either new or deprecated, and the theme gives it an icon in the navigation.
Recently, at n8n, I wanted to mark pages as beta to signal they're documentation for a beta feature. I didn't want to use new and its default icon for this, so had to add a custom status.
In my work as n8n's tech writer, I need to maintain some Kubernetes-based deployment guides. This blog post contains the steps for setting up minikube and kubectl on Windows, running it, and testing n8n's Kuberenetes hosting configurations. This is a letter to my future self. Some steps are n8n-specific, but this can also serve as a quick guide for any Kubernetes testing.
This post looks at why you'd want shared cookie consent across your subdomains, then outlines the key features to be aware of when setting this up with Material for MkDocs, and provides a code sample to help you get started.
Modify Material for MkDocs to include cover images on the blog index page.
This article describes MkDocs' default processing of tabs in code samples, explains why it can be a problem, and shows how to fix it.
Trying out Stripe's recently open sourced Markdown extension and linter.
A short list of free diagnostic tools.
Some notes to my future self, for the next time I set up a new Windows PC.
Some notes to help me next time I need to reconnect to my Pi Zero from Windows 10.