Youtube daily Sep 4 2018

Today we are going to talk about the type of documents that technical writers create

in the tech industry.

But before we get into that, we need to understand what is technical writing.

Technical Writing is a part of a bigger field called Technical Communication.

And Technical Communication is the practice of communicating

technically complex information to your audience.

The keywords here are: information and audience.

Okay, now that we have this definition, let's try to apply it to the work that technical writers do.

In my experience, technical writers create three types of documents in the tech industry:

UI-based docs, Developer docs, and Deployment docs.

Let me explain what they mean.

Let's take an example: YouTube.

YouTube is a software service that allows you to host and stream videos.

You are watching this video on YouTube, which makes you a YouTube user.

And as a user, you interact with the YouTube UI, that is the user interface

to watch, play, like, and share videos, manage your playlists, manage your account,

you know the usual YouTube stuff.

Now the developers of YouTube need a way to convey this information to their users

So the tech writers at YouTube wrote documents to help the users navigate the UI.

These docs are what I call UI-based docs.

Now let's say you want to create your own YouTube channel and upload videos to YouTube.

In that case, you are still a user of the UI, but you are a slightly advanced user.

You need documents to help you understand and navigate the advanced UI

and figure out how to upload videos.

What type of videos can you upload

How to follow the YouTube guidelines, and stuff like that.

So the documents written to help you create your own channel and upload videos

can also be categorized as UI-based docs.

Now let's take it a step further. Suppose you want to create a YouTube app.

In that case, you need more tools than just the UI.

You need YouTube APIs.

Which help you send requests to YouTube, get data from YouTube

basically integrate your app with YouTube.

The documents written to help you figure out how to integrate your app with YouTube

are called Developer Docs.

API documentation is a subset of Developer Docs.

Okay, suppose that you have created an awesome YouTube app

You are ready to launch it, which probably means you need to host it on a cloud platform.

Let's say the cloud platform you chose is DigitalOcean.

In that case, you are dealing with two software products:

You are dealing with YouTube and you are dealing with DigitalOcean.

Now you need to figure out a way how to make your app work with both of these software products.

For instance, say you want to manage network bandwidth for your users.

You need to figure out the optimal bandwidth that YouTube recommends for its video streaming service

And the optimal bandwidth that DigitalOcean supports.

And then you need to figure those things out and make them match.

And you need to refer to the documentation of both YouTube and DigitalOcean to figure that out.

The docs written to help you make these decisions and figure out the deployment process

are what I call Deployment docs.

To recap, technical writers in the software industry work on three types of documents:

UI-based docs, Developer docs, and Deployment docs

As a tech writer, you might end up working on only one of these docs, or all of them.

For example, I work on all three types of documents at work:

I work on the documentation of our distributed SQL database

I create docs to help our users navigate the Admin UI (which are the UI-based docs).

I also work on docs to help our users use our SQL APIs to build apps (which are API docs or Developer docs)

And I also work on docs to help our users about deploy and secure the apps on cloud platforms

(which are Deployment docs).

So that's what I do at work - I help our users use our awesome product

to create even more awesome products.

Best job in the world!