Recent content on Daryl J. White
Joining a new company as a solo technical writer is always a whirlwind. But joining a company in the middle of a product pivot? That’s a masterclass in architectural agility. Photo by Thirumalai Rajan P on Pexels . Often, you arrive at a new job to find a product focused library. It’s a robust, detailed, and technically accurate collection of manuals that describe every knob and lever of the…
Photo by Alex Knight on Pexels . I recently went through a round of interviews with several software companies in the cloud-native and developer tools space. While the tech stacks varied, one topic was ubiquitous: Generative AI. In 2026, simply saying, “I use AI to write faster,” isn’t enough. In fact, saying that might actually hurt your chances with companies that value…
How I’m engineering a successful first week in my new docs role. My desk, newly cleaned and ready for new things. The gap between signing a job offer and your official start date is a unique kind of limbo. The “open source” part of my brain wanted to start coding (or in my case, PRing docs) immediately. My previous post, though, was about the strategic necessity of a total mental…
Photo by Aliaksei Semirski on Pexels . We’ve all been there. The team is firing on all cylinders, cranking out innovative new features. The documentation is perfect! It’s comprehensive, clear, and included right in the Pull Request. Then, six months later, a bug report comes in. Somewhere along the way, a developer changed a timeout value, renamed a key in a JSON response, or updated a UI…
Photo by ThisIsEngineering on Pexels . There’s a specific feeling you get when documentation actually works. It’s not relief, exactly. It’s more like the feeling of asking a question and getting a straight answer from someone who knows what they’re talking about. Someone who anticipated what you needed, skipped the parts you already knew, and told you what to do without…
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels . AI tools are everywhere in documentation conversations right now, but most of the discussion stays abstract. This is a concrete account of how I integrated Claude into MinIO’s documentation workflow: what I used it for. how I structured that use. what it measurably changed about how the team worked. The Starting Point Technical documentation for a product like…
Photo by Adam Dubec on Pexels . If you look at a standard corporate org chart, you’ll see neat little boxes. Engineering is over here, Product is over there, Sales is on the other side of the building (or the virtual workspace), and Support is tucked away in the corner.
Modernizing Documentation at Cloud Scale In the world of high-performance distributed systems, documentation is more than just a manual. Instead, the docs serve as a critical component of the user’s infrastructure. During my tenure as a Senior Technical Writer at MinIO, I transitioned from being a content creator to a “Documentation Architect.” My GitHub contributions reflect the level…
Photo by olia danilevich on Pexels . There is a persistent myth that technical writers sit around waiting for a developer to “finish” a feature so we can write the documentation. In this version of reality, we are the stenographers of the software world, recording what happened after the dust has settled.
MinIO introduced a new feature to AIStor for taking a node offline for maintenance. For this feature, I needed to explain how the feature works. As an AIStor feature applicable both in Kubernetes and non-Kubernetes environments, it was also important to distinguish it from the similar kubectl cordon functionality system administrators would also be familiar with. Some notes: The quote block text…
MinIO Warp is an open-source tool for testing storage performance. It allows you to plan capacity and make sure the infrastructure meets requirements. After MinIO’s migration to Hugo for documentation, I went about the task of adding documentation for Warp that previously only existed in the upstream code repositories. This particular document covers two types of tests Warp provides. I put…
Photo by Brett Jordan at Pexels . In the Write the Docs Slack community , folks often ask how to go about deciding what documentation tool or set of tools is the right one to use. I have taken to replying often with a series of questions, instead of answering. Why the Socratic method? Because tooling for docs is a very, very circumstance-specific choice. No one answer is correct. As I have often…
Photo by Startup Stock Photos from Pexels . Curious about what a technical writer can do for you? Here are twenty-five things you might find a technical writer doing in their job on any given day: Interviewing a subject matter expert to learn more about what they are writing about. This might be a product manager, project lead, developer, customer, salesperson, developer advocate, end user, nearly…
Photo by Jonas_Fehre at Pixabay . As a guy in my mid-40s, my health is something that has become increasingly “in my face”. I’ve never been someone who worked out. After developing Crohn’s disease in 2016, I did an elimination diet and lost 50 pounds. That led me to my lowest adult weight of 165lbs. But in the years since, I’ve settled into a desk job as a technical…
Photo by Greta Hoffman at Pexels . He’d always been told to bloom where he was planted. But there were two very acute problems with this: He wasn’t a flower. He wasn’t planted anywhere, either. Trevor rubbed his temples. Ms. Perez needed milk and eggs. Mr. Grant had a bulb to change that he couldn’t reach. The new couple in 4B wanted to try their sofa on a different wall.…
Photo by Marek Piwnicki at Pexels . One star peeped out in the darkening sky. A wispy cloud shrouded the crescent moon. Wind meandered over the ground, interrupted here and there by the jut of a line or the tower of a boulder. Life had crawled here, once. Broken out of the top bit of crust and tried to shape the exterior to its whims. For the briefest of time, that life had even seemed in control.
Photo by Lisa Fotios at Pexels . The smell wafted under the door and enveloped her bed. It roused her from her phone screen with its intensity. Childhood. Friendships. Love, and love abandoned. Grief. Deepest, heart wrenching grief. Laughter. The pressure of exams. The intoxication of the work triumph. It was all there. Around her. Over her. In her lungs. Breath after breath.
Photo by cottonbro studio at Pexels . Ten fingers rested on a lap. Just that morning, they had gripped hard the handle of the spoon they used to stir together a batch of cookies. Later, they held and moved the pen across a letter to a friend on the other side of the ocean. Recently, they touched flowers along the trail as they took their evening walk.
Photo by Ketut Subiyanto at Pexels . Dane smiled as he walked over his threshold and set his bag on the side table. It had been a good day. Only good decisions today. He reflected on each of those decisions in turn, amazed at how they furthered the world toward a better future, small as each was. But as he emptied his pockets to put the bad decisions in the collection box, there was a moment of…
Photo by Mikhail Nilov at Pexels . The wind swirled and ruffled the blanket spread on the well-groomed lawn of the quad. Glancing over, Jace watched the fabric slowly rise and fall back as the air took it and let it go. They laid back again and stared up at the passing clouds, wishing that, like the blanket, the tasks before them would let go. Clouds passed. A rabbit. A leaf. The wind swirled…
Photo by Pixabay at Pexels . The tall one, leaning against the wall, sighed. “What will become of us? We’ve waited in shadows and darkness for so long.” Her friend, laying on the flat surface where they could rest before the morrow’s demands replied, “Hard to say. It could really be anything.” — The master picked up the newest pencil she had laid against the…
Photo by Monstera at Pexels . Liam stared at the crack, like he did virtually all of the time here. There was no way for him to know whether the cot had melded to his back, or his back to the cot. Either way, they were basically a single entity now. His back, the cot, and that crack. Sometimes he imagined shrinking into the crack and exploring the other side. Sometimes he imagined the crack…
Photo credit: by Sara Kurfeß at Unsplash . I started using Git and GitHub for docs in 2019. It’s been a slow build, but I’ve finally started to learn some helpful ways of going about things. So there are two GitHub specific tips I want to share with you that have helped me out in my day to day. Choose where a repo’s notifications go For the longest time, I just let all of my…
Photo by Kaique Rocha at Pexels . In early 2016, I followed other members of my family in dealing with a quite awful stomach flu. It wasn’t a fun thing, but it passed on as those things do. Until it didn’t. Onset See, while the symptoms at first subsided, things got weird not too long after I thought I’d recovered. What do I mean by “weird”? Well, for starters, I…
Photo by Pixabay at Pexels . Why is good knowledge care critical? Every business, small or large, has a body of knowledge around its existence. The business has one or more products or services it sells. It has processes for how to obtain, create, or use the products or services. It has sales documents and collateral. There are accounting charts and customer lists. How to manuals and vendors. Hire…
Photo by Samson Katt on Pexels . Good docs have (at least) six key characteristics: Findable For documentation to be worth the time spent creating it, the user needs to be able to get to those docs when a problem or curiosity creates a need for information. The best docs do nobody any good if they can’t put their hands or eyes on them when they need them.
Photo by Alexas Fotos from Pexels . There are many flavors of technical writing. Mine is software. One of the constants of any software team is the change that comes with employee churn. People find new opportunities by joining your team. People find new opportunities and leave your team for elsewhere.
Photo by Moose Photos from Pexels . I would like to thank the tech writers in the Write the Docs Slack ’s #lone-writer channel for bringing these ideas to the top of my mind. Everyone suffers from a bias of familiarity when looking at our docs. Once you read something once, the next time you read it the mind can anticipate and insert what it remembers and expects to be there. This happens…
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels . Are docs a good investment? One of the challenges every documentarian faces is justifying the investment in docs. Whether that investment is salary training and professional development expanded doc team tooling dev help for site development It can feel like we technical writers are always battling it out for the company’s money. And, often, the experience…
Photo by Startup Stock Photos from Pexels . Technical writing can be an introvert’s dream. (I know, I am one!) That said, there are two communities that every tech writer needs to develop to thrive in our work. Network of co-workers and subject matter experts Other tech writers for support and professional development Why are these communities vital? And how does a tech writer go about…
In planning out a new feature, the Product Manager wrote out an issue card in GitHub for developers to reference. The card included the PM’s notes from visits on site with customers. I updated the card by: Removing extraneous verbiage Adding sections and rearranging content Updating references to existing product features Some portions of the issue make sense within the broader product…
Photo by Brett Jordan at Pexels . What makes a good technical document? A good technical article, document, or topic has a few key points that make it stand out: It understands the user and has empathy for the situation that brought them here, now. Don’t miss this point. It’s key. A good technical article has to be inside the mind of the user that’s come to the article.
About this sample The information below is about a fictitious software product, “Assetly.” I based Assetly on a real product I documented, though many details have changed in this document. I wrote the original product document in Madcap Flare in consultation with a number of subject matter experts, including: Product Manager Developers Quality Assurance team Sales team members who…
About this sample The information below is about a task a user would need to complete in a fictitious software product, “Assetly.” I based Assetly on a real product I documented, though many details have changed in this document. I wrote the original document in Madcap Flare based on my own use of the software. During my use of the real product, I occasionally uncovered bugs or more…
Photo by Ron Lach from Pexels . You can’t hang out with knowledge management platforms for long without realizing that their structure, or, should I say, “architecture,” gets dated. It cracks. It goes stale. Stale knowledge, a litany Knowledge stops functioning the way it did at the beginning. The roads go awry. There are turnabouts everywhere. Dead ends. So many dead ends.
About this sample For a job application process, I was asked to revise a sample business requirements document . The provided example was a template purporting to be notes from several different meetings. I left the headings from the template as they were, but edited and formatted the contents of each section. While the original sample was done in Word, I have recreated it here with Markdown,…
My first job at a software company landed me in a software training role. While I learned a great deal about adult learning and best practices for knowledge transfer, my proudest achievement while I was there involved project management . Our department had a catalog of 160 course manuals. These manuals varied in length from 20 pages to several hundred pages. These were course guides for the…
Photo by Mat Brown from Pexels . So you’ve done the work and you are ready to convert your docs from one tool to another. I, too, have done this. Actually, I am on my third time through doing such a massive undertaking. This time, as a lone writer having to maintain docs in both the old platform and the new.
Photo by Cottonbro Studios from Pexels . I have spent the last year at my current job working on transitioning our docs from Madcap Flare to Antora . First things, Madcap Flare is a great tool. This is the third place I have worked that has used Flare for some form of documentation, and it does its job well. However, there are several factors that impacted the decision to move away from Flare to…
Photo by Vojtech Okenka from Pexels . TL;DR Here’s what I did to create this site and give myself a (well, almost) free site to build out a portfolio. Create an account with a Git service provider. I used GitLab I already had, but GitHub also works. Select a starter template from Forestry.io for the desired SSG (static site generator) and create it on Forestry. Forestry.io automatically adds…
My journey into tech writing started in 2013. Reynolds and Reynolds Software Training I started out my journey into the world of talking and writing about technology and software as a customer trainer at Reynolds and Reynolds. A provider of software and other services for car dealerships, I taught dealership personnel and new ReyRey hires how to use the accounting and payroll portions of the…