Re: being seen

[David Castro <thetechwriter -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

My former coworker, Martha J Davidson <editrix -at- nemasys -dot- com> said:

> Something unexpected happened to me yesterday.  At the end of
> a long day spent with two SMEs...one of them...asked, "do all technical 
> writers go out of their way to learn as much about the technology as you 
> do?"  I stopped for a second and replied, "the good ones do."  I told him I 
> can't write credibly about something unless I understand it myself.

I had something similar happen to me a couple of weeks ago. I traveled from my
new home in South Carolina back to California to spend some time with the head
architect. We are working on a brand new product, and I'm the main writer on it
because I'm more technical than the other writer, and I can create material
from scratch, rather than requiring developers to send me material that I can
"pretty up."

Anyway, I walked into his home office the second day, and he was on the phone
with a developer that I had worked with in *his* home in Massachussetts a few
weeks earlier. Here's how I remember the end of the conversation I could hear:

"Yeah, we're going to add connection pooling to the Rules Server to improve
performance. I'm adding a couple of attributes to the configuration file to
allow Java classes to remain in memory after they're done being executed. David
pointed out that idea to me."

[pause]

[discussion of some other stuff about our product]

"Actually, that's something that we're going to have to talk about. We are
going to run into some issues if we handle things that way. David pointed out
that if we have burst traffic, we could end up with a lot of Java modules left
using up memory that won't get used, again."

[pause]

"No, I don't think that David *wants* to be in development."


Nothing like having a developer suggest that you move into development to make
your day, even if the thought doesn't necessarily appeal to you. :-)

-David Castro
 email -at- davidcastro -dot- com
 http://www.davidcastro.com

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