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I'm happy to report that I attended the G&G workshops in Toronto on April 7
and 8 (manager and Manny, take note) and here is my personal report
(considering that I am not a Technical technical writer):
Nicola, great to see you again! I met TWs from Toronto and the greater
Toronto area, Ottawa, and San Francisco (Victor, I hope you got home all
right; keep yer eye on To. opportunties).
The Strathcona Hotel is nothing like I remember it from the mid-80s (thank
gawd). Semimar accommodation is a bit flaky, but the service and decor and
cookies are wunnerful.
Just Enough Java -- tough. My last programming course was in 1985 or so
(Pascal), and Java is an entirely different animal. I learned enough to know
I don't know enough to successfully document our APIs without a great deal
of programmer assistance, although there are remarkable sources on the 'net
about Java (see http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/)
The workshop suggests a lot of methods the TW can use to get the assistance
from source. We're not mindreaders, after all<stitch>, and I lucked out with
my SMEs. For anyone who already does Javadoc, it might be superfluous. One
of my new cube-mates has asked me to help him document some DB diagrams.
Documenting APIs and SDKs -- again, our doc infrastructure is limited/none
and so is my access to it: an agreeable question to our Web developers might
be, "So, do you guys comment yer code at all?" Our practices are not the
best, but our developers are. I tried today to download doxygen, but I
haven't got past the sign-on yet. I envy the writers who are already
performing these functions, but I can't say I found the workshop valuable --
YET.
Why, just today I volunteered to document the procedures to migrate code
from Dev to QA, so our QA guys can pass on the knowledge. They looked
surprised (but then, you don't work here).
Karen Black in Toronto, still has a job after all these years (2)
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Is fearr socrú dá dhonacht ná dlí dá fheabhas.
It's better to solve the problem than to improve the law.
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