When you struggle to find the proper design for your software, you may need to fix how you designed your teams — As Matthew Skelton writes in the first pages of his Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow (non-affiliated link): The key takeaway here is that thinking of software architecture as a standalone concept that can be designed in isolation and then implemented by any group of teams…

“Writing” in “technical writing” dominates over “technical,” and writing means tracking things in an linear and purposeful manner — Being a technical writer is much more than delivering user manuals. It’s a way of looking at the world by simplifying the language required to describe it. Life is hard. Life is simple. Both sentences are meaningless. The language we use to narrate life is either hard or simple.

The world is getting faster and faster, and the time to think is less and less — We all must make fast decisions daily, but deciding requires a bit of instinct and tons of thinking: how can we decide with near to zero time to think? The brutal truth is that thinking is fed by preparation. …

From the .com enthusiasm to the cloud, the dynamics of the foundation of the future, which the IT industry is supposed to be — Until the 2000s, the IT industry had an old-style mindset. It was about building software to explore what automation could do, but the hardware was the protagonist. Think of what Bill Gates remembered for the 40th anniversary of Microsoft: Early on, Paul Allen and I set the goal of a…

Like distinguishing between problem and solution, the difference between value and cost is trivial but often neglected; let’s explore how that is possible — Once upon a time, there were user stories. They’ve become the standard way to write backlog items. They’ve become the popular way to confuse benefits and tasks and, consequently, forget benefits as the North Star for adding features to a service.

There’s a precise moment when you, as a technical writer, will likely lose control of the information flowing from SMEs: when boundaries among concepts are lost — The more I face complex stuff, the more I discover things would be much more straightforward if shaped with the appropriate language and approach. Besides, when I discovered the Domain-Driven Design (DDD), I knew everything was already there, just to be learned. Magic!

You’re scared that someone else will read the intimate telling of you, so you don’t write your journal, and it’s a mistake — You can write a digital journal, encrypt it, and be sure that it is implausible that anyone will access your notes. It is the most straightforward solution technology provides at almost zero cost. Yet… Yet, typing is not writing, and even using a digital pen — such as the Apple…

Why do we say “write”? What’s the origin of the most beloved word for us as writers? — If you are a writer and constantly feel the sweet need for writing, the curiosity about the origin of the word “write” arises sooner or later. So it happened to me. If I had to say what words are — beyond the dictionary — I’d describe them as magic. They…

It’s all about words, yet just a few professionals in the software industry pay enough attention to them: why? In his presentation What is DDD at the DDD Europe 2019, Eric Evans says a simple truth: when designing software, there are two perspectives to reconcile — the perspective of software…