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2 posts tagged with "Career"

Reflections on the technical writing profession, developer advocacy, and building a career at the intersection of documentation and code.

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The Quiet Part

Terminal session that starts with rapid-fire project commands at full opacity, gradually fading and spacing out until only an empty prompt and a lone blinking orange cursor remain at the bottom
· ~5 min read
Ryan Goodrich
Ryan Goodrich
Technical Writer, AI Enthusiast, and Developer Advocate

You may have noticed it got quiet around here.

No farewell post. No "exciting announcement." No carefully worded "I'm pivoting to..." thread with a blue-sky emoji. Just... silence. Three weeks of it, which in blog-time is roughly equivalent to leaving a shopping cart in the middle of the grocery aisle and walking out of the store.

I owe you an explanation. Or, more accurately, I don't owe you anything, but I'm going to give you one anyway because I spent the last three weeks staring at my projects and feeling nothing, and it turns out that's worth talking about.

I Write the Docs Before the Code, and Yes, I Know That's Weird

Terminal session descending diagonally like a staircase into a rabbit hole. Level 1: cat README.md shows a project overview. Level 2: curl site.com/llms.txt fetches curated content. Level 3: HTTP 403 Forbidden from Cloudflare. Level 4: grep -r 'why' finds waf-paradox.md and trust-gap.md. Level 5: depth unknown, docs all the way down.
· ~10 min read
Ryan Goodrich
Ryan Goodrich
Technical Writer, AI Enthusiast, and Developer Advocate

I have a confession to make. When I start a new project, any project, doesn't matter what it is, the first thing I do is open a Markdown file and start writing documentation for something that doesn't exist yet.

Not code. Not a prototype. Not even a to-do list. Documentation.

I realize this makes me sound like the kind of person who reads the terms of service before clicking "I Agree." I promise I'm not. (I absolutely am.)