Articles

Twilio is regarded as one of the API industry’s leaders, so when, after five years, Twilio changes the documentation format on their developer portal, everybody wants to know why. Jarod Reyes and Andrew Baker (both developers of Twilio's developer education team) gave a presentation about the reason for the changes at SIGNAL 2016. Because we found them valuable and wanted to share them with our developer portal mailinglist, we’ll summarize their findings in this blog post.

Technical writer teams are asked the impossible: chronically understaffed, fulfill growing expectations, while dealing with the disruptions of a barrage of technological innovations. Technology however doesn’t need to be a curse, it could be a blessing: new technologies could also be used to help technical writers. In this series I want explore how artificial intelligence and new/rediscovered interaction models for software documentation could redefine technical writing and its deliverables. __Part 5: Automated proactive support as embedded messages__ What are our next steps to explore the application of AI in documentation? How can we use a messaging framework to send highly relevant chunks of content to a user?

Technical writer teams are asked the impossible: chronically understaffed, fulfill growing expectations, while dealing with the disruptions of a barrage of technological innovations. Technology however doesn’t need to be a curse, it could be a blessing: new technologies could also be used to help technical writers. In this series I want explore how artificial intelligence and new/rediscovered interaction models for software documentation could redefine technical writing and its deliverables. Part 4: Repeating Clippy’s mistakes with Walkthroughs Learning from Clippy’s mistakes. How can we define proactive support? How can we avoid repeating Clippy’s mistakes?

Technical writer teams are asked the impossible: chronically understaffed, fulfill growing expectations, while dealing with the disruptions of a barrage of technological innovations. Technology however doesn’t need to be a curse, it could be a blessing: new technologies could also be used to help technical writers. In this series I want explore how artificial intelligence and new/rediscovered interaction models for software documentation could redefine technical writing and its deliverables. __Part 3: Clippy, misunderstood brilliance before its time__ Microsoft’s Clippy was a great idea: sometimes it does pay off to give people advice even if they didn’t ask for it yet. So why did it fail?

Technical writer teams are asked the impossible: chronically understaffed, fulfill growing expectations, while dealing with the disruptions of a barrage of technological innovations. Technology however doesn’t need to be a curse, it could be a blessing: new technologies could also be used to help technical writers. In this series I want explore how artificial intelligence and new/rediscovered interaction models for software documentation could redefine technical writing and its deliverables. __Part 2: The Helpful co-worker model__ Teaching and giving advice is part of human nature. Helpful co-workers as a support services: when are they successful and how do they fail?

Technical writer teams are asked the impossible: chronically understaffed, fulfill growing expectations, while dealing with the disruptions of a barrage of technological innovations. Technology however doesn’t need to be a curse, it could be a blessing: new technologies could also be used to help technical writers. In this series I want explore how artificial intelligence and new/rediscovered interaction models for software documentation could redefine technical writing and its deliverables. __Part 1: Documentation at a crossroads__ What jobs do we need documentation to fulfill? Why is documentation under pressure? Why do we need AI in documentation?