AI isn't coming for your job.
It's coming for the tasks that make up your job.
This isn’t a new story.
If you’ve ever read a James Bond novel, you’ll remember the typing pool. Highly trained typists who could type super-fast and send confidential reports to the four corners of the world to stymie the latest villain. You don’t see too many typing tools any more. When the typewriter arrived, the typing pool as we knew vanished.
When we're in the role of a 'reader' we tend to skim over the 'happy path' in user guides and other types of documentation. Quite often we only turn to documentation when lost, confused, or uncertain. For instance, someone changed a parameter setting and we can't figure out how to fix it. So, we crack open the docs, search, and go hunting for the answer. But where is it? What should I search for?
I mention this as last week, I started to listen to Roger Penrose's 'The Emperor's New Mind' and came across a section where he discusses 'truth tables' in the context of classical logic and computation, and also their limitations in terms of understanding 'human' consciousness.
On the way home from my walk, I began to think if I could apply this concept to technical documentation.
As this question, and variations of it, have popped up on Reddit and LinkedIn, I thought I'd share a few observations about my experience of working with Agile/Scrum as a tech writer.
One thing to say before we start, is that just became a company says it's Agile, doesn't mean it's applying all of the framework. Rather, they may be selectively picking pieces of it, such as using Daily Stand Ups, but not fully embracing the spirit of Agile development. In many cases, they're probably 'Agilefall' (Agile + Waterfall).
What's the best tool for managing technical documentation websites?
You've probably seen something like this on LinkedIn or Reddit. And the answer is, as always, 'it depends'.
For example, this site is run on Docusaurus, which is pretty easy to setup and maintain. It also works very nicely with Git and our web hosting provider, so for a relatively simple site, it's fine. I should add that you can Docusaurus is not just for lightweight document sites as it has quite a lot of rich features, themes, and a very active community. So, worth a peek if you're looking to get started.
However, there are a few things it doesn't offer. At least, not out of the box. This leads us to Antora.