Recent content on Kevin R. Kuhl
The Boring Internet is a wonderful post by Terry Godier about what’s dying and what remains as the internet changes. It echoes my own sentiments about RSS surviving its own death . The core idea is that we shouldn’t care about the platforms, even if they once offered us convenience; we should care about the standards and ways of communicating. Anyways, the core idea of what we should care about…
Paul Olson is a software engineer with a background in platform engineering and observability, and is working on an engineer’s history of web architecture . Here’s how he describes the project: The years spanning from 1993 to 2015 were extraordinary. Linux and FreeBSD became mainstream server operating systems, the NCSA httpd project was released, it begat the Apache HTTP server, which…
While I’ve been looking for my next professional thing, I’ve been working on a community organization side project. The idea is to support a community group with recurring events, allowing people to come together to share skills, knowledge, and build relationships. Ordinary human being stuff. But if you’ve been following my blog, you know that I have an opinionated view on social…
My love of RSS is something I’m not shy about. I think it’s a pretty excellent one-to-many communication tool. But what’s interesting is if you look at its history, it had one major flaw (that’s also partly why I love it). And in many people’s minds, RSS is a dead technology. This blog post came directly from a slack discussion with the local tech scene that went a…
Markdown is pretty cool. It’s flexible, comes in different flavours, and it’s everywhere. Anil Dash goes into the history of markdown and blogging (and some of my problems with CMSes) in his latest post : Because sometimes those writers would inspire us to make a new feature in the publishing tools, and sometimes they would have hacked up a new feature all by themselves in between…
Automations are great. It’s pretty cool to explore building them. And it’s exhillarating when it works. This is the appeal behind Factorio , a game entirely about building and optimizing supply chains. It’s addictive watching your expanding world of conveyor belts, resource extraction, and processing facilities. Building the POSSE script for this website has felt similar.…
Here’s a really nice piece from Drew Bruenig about why you should write. These reasons are definitely part of why I’m writing this blog (and why I link blog). It’s also why I’m happy to see more technical writers joining the technical writing webring . I think writing is one of the most valuable things you can do, and I recommend everyone try it. Here’s why: It makes you a…
Writing about AI was hard. I was once a TA for a philosophy course where students were encouraged to write about AI, back before the advent of ChatGPT and generative AI. It was difficult giving feedback even when navigating a reading list I was familiar with — students came from a range of backgrounds in philosophy, cognitive science, computer science, etc. I’m glad I’m not TAing…
In my previous post , I explained the theory behind the Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE) script I’ve been working on for this blog. POSSE is a strategy for managing and distributing your writing. Since this Hugo site is my home base on the web, adding an automated syndication script would be a fun and powerful project. Here’s a public repository for the script on…
I like the IndieWeb ; it’s an idea and emerging set of standards for how to build independent websites that can talk to one another. I’m gradually building this website towards that ideal. One of the underlying ideas is POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) or COPE (Create Once, Post Everywhere). The basic idea behind POSSE is that content should be posted to my own…
Over at This is important , Sarah Moir has an excellent discussion of AI strategy for technical writers and documentation teams. In particular, I really agree with her on this: You can invest in building a chatbot with a tool like Fin , Inkeep , or Kapa . But I don’t recommend placing the chatbot on the documentation site. When you build your own chatbot and provide it on your docs, you create…
Google just announced Code Wiki . The timing of this is kind of personally frustrating, since I was deep into a post about where AI tooling and software documentation is at in the year 2025. Now that post is going to get a couple of extra paragraphs. The copy is certainly striking, using phrases like, “Stop documenting”, “No more stale docs. Ever.” Understandably, this hits…
I’ve been posting a lot about technical writing recently, but I also like thinking about the Internet. This is a really nice interview with Tim Berners Lee on Decoder (the Verge’s podcast). First up, on podcasts… They always try to persuade you to use the app, because then they have more control, they can track you better. But also with podcasts particularly, I use a podcast…
In a recent post , I covered various knowledge resources and docs-sites, including a brief discussion about knowledge bases. A common practice for building a knowledge base is Knowledge Centred Service (KCS) . If you’re a technical writer, you’ve likely encountered it—and maybe felt uneasy. KCS involves service team members creating articles that look a lot like your…
Following a discussion on LinkedIn about why more technical writers should blog, I’ve joined a new project: the tech writing webring , started by Casey Smith. What’s a webring? A circular structure of websites that are linked together, organized around a theme or perspective. Basically this was a way to help people discover content prior to search engines. It’s a fun,…
As a technical writer, you will contribute to different kinds of documentation projects. It’s important that documentation responsibilities are aligned with a coherent strategy . One of the biggest things to know about documentation (that people don’t think about) is that the word documentation is polysemous . The various meanings pretty much guarantee that at more chaotic employers you will be…
Great post from CT Smith at docsgoblin.com : At a previous role, WE WANT DOCS LIKE STRIPE was directed at me, with full eye contact during a meeting, by a leadership team that refused to give me any money for tooling or development resources. I cracked and said “Stripe has like seven engineers on their doc tooling alone, I’m not sure what you expect from me with my current resourcing.…
A couple of my more recent posts have been “link blogs”, but what am I doing when I do that and why put the effort in at all? What is a link blog? A link blog post is a short blog post for something that I’ve read, which interests me. I’ll publish a link, some commentary, and any excerpts that interest me. The goal is for them to be brief. This idea is loosely taken from…
My TV watching habits have changed pretty dramatically with the times. I still love shows like NBC’s Hannibal—dark, aesthetic, dramatic. But more often than not, I find myself reaching for something a bit more lighthearted and fun. I’m nerdy. I’m a millennial. In short, I’m the target audience of dropout.tv . Depending on your interests, you might have been exposed to…
One of the things that has surprised me most in my career was the extent to which you may need to advocate for your skills and the utility of your profession within a changing workplace. As a technical writer, it’s easy to say you produce documentation, but “documentation” is a word that means many different things to different people. Ideally, you have a manager with a clear…
If you’ve been interested in understanding the world of Bluesky and AT Proto, Kuba Suder has been writing excellent blog posts. I’ll be following along closely, since I think that algorithmic choice is going to be an extremely important feature of any social media framework that I would want to use. A Complete Guide to Bluesky serves as an introduction to Bluesky, as an app: But that’s…
A vendor-agnostic architectural guide for IT administrators connecting cloud apps to on-premises hardware. This piece employs “Secure by Design” principles, clearly separating forwarding rules from firewall configurations to mitigate deployment risks. It features architectural diagrams and standardized terminology to ensure successful deployment in hybrid network environments. This was…
Targeted at business stakeholders and admins, this guide demystifies the OAuth handshake to overcome security anxiety. By utilizing clear analogies (The Valet Key) and a multimedia approach, this content removes friction from the “Grant Access” decision, directly supporting product adoption and integration stickiness. This was written based on a developer portal page that explained the…
This guide bridges the gap between raw API schemas and non-technical warehouse administrators. By creating a learning path and a dedicated JSON primer, I enabled users to configure complex ERP-warehouse management solutions integrations independently. This reduced engineering support tickets regarding integration failures by empowering the end-user to understand data structures. This was…
This document is a blueprint of my technical writing process. As the first or “lone writer” it’s important to have a clear process so that managers and colleagues can understand how to work with me. This was written for working with small teams including developers , product managers , and CX staff. As part of workflows using Linear, JIRA, or a similar tool. It’s meant to…
Here’s an excellent post on “reasoning” and “chain of thought” models by Drew Bruenig: What We Mean When We say “Think” . It provides a history, and description of how these pieces of technology function, and makes predictions about how certain kinds of testing will shape the perceptions of the utility of LLMs. All in all, it’s a good read if you…
This is a question I’ve been asking myself lately. It’s exciting to be living through the advent of what feels like a major technological change, but I feel like this isn’t a question we never really stop to think about. So much of our lives are immersed in technology and influenced by its creators. And pivoting from philosophy to a career in “tech” — by which…
Docs ( GitHub ) is an open source alternative to Notion/Google Docs being built by the French and German governments (with the Netherlands being onboarded). This is exactly the sort of work I like to see coming out of governments. Crucially, this application can be self-hosted. Given our current political landscape, digital sovereignty is going to become significantly more important. What I like…
This is a quick post inspired by a situation that someone posted about on r/TechnicalWriting . A technical writer is working as a contractor, needed to evaluate the readability of their content, but was limited in terms of the tools that they could acquire due to strict security and confidentiality requirements. At first glance, assessing how hard it is to read a text is a matter of semantics…
There’s a lot of great insights in this talk with Meredith Whittaker at SXSW . It’s refreshing to see someone talk so straightforwardly about privacy and the incentives that shape our current notions of innovation and progress: I particularly like how she articulates why we should care about privacy: Look, everyone’s always had something to hide… you all close your…
I feel like technical writers are kind of a difficult creature to understand. Documentation is one of those words that means so many different things to so many different people, but primarily, we build written resources that explain how to use technical products. In my career, the technical products have been software. The audience for my writing has been admins, developers, or non-technical…
One of my goals for 2025 is to remove my dependency on social media. I previously discussed how I was staying on top of local news and events without relying on a platform like Facebook. As a Canadian, Facebook stopped being an effective news platform after Meta decided to remove any linked content to Canadian news providers following the Online News Act (Bill C-18) . This left Facebook’s…
One of the main reasons people use social media is to stay connected to the flow of information within their community. I’ve been intentionally disentangling my digital life from Meta over the past several years. I’ve essentially stopped actively using Facebook and only use certain communication services because they’re preferred for group chats. Finishing this process has become…
I’ve been thinking about how generative AI impacts the ways people find, retrieve, and access information. As a technical writer, my job involves helping build systems for these purposes. This lead me to consider the ways I could build skills in this area. Inspired by Luke Hsiao’s house documentation project , I’ve been wanting to implement a document system for managing information about my…
Welcome to my blog! My name is Kevin . I am a software technical writer in Canada and this is a return to blogging after a few years. I previously blogged about trail running in and around my home province. Up until recently, I was happy with my personal website as a repository for my CV and a small home space on the web. Running a blog in 2024 might seem a little passé, after all blogging’s…