This is just a post to capture some of the things that I was involved in in 2010 that have been reported / blogged about elsewhere.
Atlassian Doc Sprint
I stumbled across the site for the Atlassian Doc Sprint and thought it sounded quite interesting so put up my hand to volunteer for the project. 2 days in at the Atlassian Sydney office and working with the Atlassian team in SFO via video conference was great. I love going into other companies and “looking behind the curtain” to see how they work. I learnt some things about technical writing and got to meet the team of technical writers at Atlassian. There are definitely some things that can be improved about the Doc Sprint, but as a concept, I think it’s a great idea, and if you are into Atlassian products, I’d recommend doing it next time to get involved.
So now, there is a page or two on the official Atlassian documentation that was created by me (mind you, the end result is nicely tidied up to fit with the Atlassian style). Here is a post by Sarah Maddox explaining the guide to Developing Technical Documentation on Confluence Wiki.
Girl Develop It
Girl Develop It is a fantastic initiative by Pamela Fox from Google to train women in all thing tech. It is based on the similar program set up in New York. Kate Carruthers introduced me to the program so I signed up to help out with the first course – HTML and CSS. The course was a great success and Kate did a blog post and video of me talking about the course. Pamela has also released her course material which is full of great information. I learned even more than I was giving back, I’m sure. Next up in February is the Javascript course – Book in now, it’s well worth it.
