Reflections
Articles exploring and reflecting on documentation, systems, and the evolving role of technical writers.
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The State of Docs, August 2026
Read more >: The State of Docs, August 2026Technical writers are facing a weak hiring market at the same time that employers are expanding what they expect from documentation roles. AI is making content production cheaper, while skills around APIs, automation, retrieval, evaluation, governance, and documentation infrastructure are becoming more valuable. The work isn’t disappearing, but the traditional “technical writer” role is getting…
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How to Choose a CCMS Based on Your Documentation Needs
Read more >: How to Choose a CCMS Based on Your Documentation NeedsThere is no universally “best” CCMS. Different documentation platforms are designed around different assumptions about structure, governance, collaboration, publishing, maintenance, and scale. A system that works well for support-oriented knowledge sharing may become painful for complex product documentation over time, while a heavily structured platform may create unnecessary overhead for smaller or simpler documentation environments.…
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Outsourcing the Self With AI
Read more >: Outsourcing the Self With AIThere is a question I keep coming back to, and I don’t think it gets asked often enough in the avalanche of discourse about what AI can do, what jobs it will eliminate, and how quickly everything is changing. The question is this: what does it mean to remain a thinking, self-determining person in an…
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How AI Is Changing SaaS — and Why Documentation Has to Change With It
Read more >: How AI Is Changing SaaS — and Why Documentation Has to Change With ItThere is a growing narrative that AI will replace SaaS. The argument usually goes something like this: if software can perform work autonomously, then we no longer need software tools. Instead of Software-as-a-Service, we’ll move toward "Service-as-Software" systems that simply deliver outcomes. This framing seems compelling, but it misunderstands what SaaS actually is.
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Mapping the Knowledge System
Read more >: Mapping the Knowledge SystemThe diagram I’ve been building toward (the foundation of a new series launching on The Doc Landscape called The Living Knowledge System) maps the system that product knowledge actually moves through in a software company. Not all knowledge in a company. Not HR onboarding or sales enablement or anything else. Specifically the knowledge that’s born…
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Docs-as-Code: A Good Idea in the Wrong Hands
Read more >: Docs-as-Code: A Good Idea in the Wrong HandsDocs-as-code has two versions in circulation and they rarely get distinguished. The narrow one says: write in plain text, use Git, work like an engineer. The broader one says: bring structure, rigor, and shared ownership to documentation work, using whatever tools best serve that goal.
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The Real Communication Barriers in Distributed Documentation Teams
Read more >: The Real Communication Barriers in Distributed Documentation TeamsTechnical writers depend on cross-functional communication more than almost any other role in software. In distributed teams, that communication breaks down in different ways.
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How Technical Writers Can Think Like Documentation Engineers
Read more >: How Technical Writers Can Think Like Documentation EngineersIf documentation is now part of a living knowledge system, then the role responsible for it has to evolve as well. The shift happening in documentation work isn’t just about new tools or faster workflows. It reflects a deeper change in how documentation is understood.
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The Forces Reshaping Documentation Work
Read more >: The Forces Reshaping Documentation WorkDocumentation today is no longer created, published, and consumed in isolation. It’s more like tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean, except the ocean is your organization, the bottle might get opened by an AI, and someone three departments over is using your carefully worded explanation to answer a question you never imagined.
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Documentation Has Entered a New Era
Read more >: Documentation Has Entered a New EraFor a long time, documentation followed software. Products were designed, built, and shipped. Then documentation came afterward. Today, software is designed and built while documentation is created in parallel, and both ship together. Documentation is no longer cleanup work. It’s part of delivery.