I think all technical writers, at some point or another, feel the urge to base their work on something more systematic than “it’s just the way folks documented stuff since forever”. Toolkits and frameworks provide content types, which is immensely valuable when you know what you want to write, but starting from there is like buying a hammer without knowing that half of the work you’ll do is turning screws. As I find the lack of deeper conversation around this topic rather unsettling, I decided to contribute some verses.

For the first time since I started this blog, I’m writing some predictions on software technical writing for next year. Not because I think they’ll be accurate—they never are—but because the exercise reveals what we’re concerned about and what we hope to tackle. Predictions are to-do lists in disguise: they highlight challenges we’re determined to overcome. Plus, they’re fun to write. So here are my predictions for 2025, knowing I’ll enjoy being proven wrong.

I’m a terrible user of documentation. I tend to consume docs in a hurry, reading diagonally, Control+Fing my way to things. I generally mistreat the interface of docs until I obtain something resembling an answer. I do this because I’ve little time and I need to fix issues fast. I love examples I can copy and paste. I’ve little patience for verbose documentation and even less for docs that look like they were written without care or skill. I’m not only bothered by inaccuracy, but also by bad style. In a way, as a user of documentation, I’m the worst nightmare of a technical writer.

Everybody loves to hate Frequently Asked Questions, or FAQs. More often than not, technical writers pale and stagger at the sight of hefty, unsorted FAQs, as if they were beholding a writhing mass of primal chaos. Others value their pragmatic qualities: FAQs, they say, lower the bar to contribution and are good fuel for LLMs and search engines. My opinion is that FAQs pose a problem only when there’s no strategy around their usage.

I recently was a guest on The Stack Overflow’s Podcast today, talking about docs (of course), the Vale prose linter, job titles, automation, LLMs, and much more. You can listen to the entire episode here or in the SO blog, or read the transcript. Getting docs closer to developers was one of my personal goals this year, and I think these kind of appearances might help. We need to be where developers are.

A reader asked me how they’d become a Documentation Engineer, because they saw I got hired as one and felt curious about what it takes to get there. This inevitably got me thinking about job titles and the evolution of tech writing, two topics that are quite central to this blog. Let me begin with the short answer: As a tech writer you’ll have to wear many hats, but you’ll always be a technical writer. Depending on your preferences, some hats will be more comfortable than others. Docs Engineer is one of those.

I’ve been using large language models (LLMs) for a while now. They accelerate and improve my output at work, to the point that losing access to them would make me feel slightly impaired in some areas. Rather than fearing WriterBot, I’m embracing the additional capabilities it grants. At the same time, I’m extremely conscious of their limitations, which are abundant. Let me tell you how LLMs are helping me in my everyday work as a documentation engineer and where they’re unable to assist me.

I’ve recently started a new job as a documentation engineer. While my work is largely the same as that of a technical writer, the sound and semantics of my new job title gave me some pause and made me think about what it really means to be doing docs-as-code. To say that it’s about writing documentation using the same tools and methods as software developers is correct, but fails to acknowledge the full consequences of the fact. Most descriptions of docs-as-code are naive because they stop at the implications of being developers’ attachés.

Some months ago I wrote a post about open source docs contributions. My dear colleague Scott Abel (The Content Wrangler) found that to be a good topic for a webinar, so today I hosted Contributing to Open Source Documentation Projects, where I expanded my thoughts on the topic and provided some practical guidance. You can also download the slides here. Enjoy!

I’ve recently found out about TypeSpec, a new language aimed at describing web APIs, through an interview that bears the provocative title of API Design in the Post-OpenAPI Era. Leaving aside the fact that OpenAPI is very much alive, what left me stupefied was the assertion that OpenAPI files should be “automatically generated artifacts and nothing more”. After digging a bit, I found the picture to be slightly more reassuring, but still quite representative of a world that keeps steering away from human-driven design to bury itself in curly brackets paradises.