To help bring our ambitious documentation plans to fruition, we’re going to be hiring people to work in documentation – over the next couple of years, we’ll be increasing the number of Technical Authors at Canonical four-fold.
This isn’t about documentation alone. If documentation is part of a product, and documentation work is part of engineering, then it has implications for engineering too.
Generally speaking, technical writing is a poorly-understood discipline in the software industry. It’s a specialised role, and though the skills that it requires are typically exercised privately, the results are very public.
And yet, everybody seems to have confident opinions about documentation! For example, an engineer might bristle hotly with indignation if an outsider were to cast judgements or make pronouncements about software theory or practice – but not hesitate to do the same about technical documentation.
Some of this is fair enough, and some of it must…
