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Suzanne Nguyen
@stringstory · A curious geek of the future
Hey David and Nathan,
This quote really grabbed my attention - "Corilla is the new technical writing."
My question is how and who are you delivering technical writing to?
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David Ryan
@davedri · Founded Corilla. Red Hat & NUMA alumnus.
@stringstory Great question. The kind of technical writing that inspired Corilla originally was the kind we were doing at Red Hat. When I joined we were still hand-coding DocBook XML, compiling with Publican and shipping RPMs. It's the kind of thing some corporations are still doing to create these monolithic narrative "books" for customer documentation. It's slow, expensive and nobody really cares about the customer experience.
We built the PressGang CCMS at Red Hat to solve those workflow problems, and over the next few years of speaking about this at technical writing conferences I kept hearing a lot of "me too" from other agitated content teams. But then not just the enterprise teams - we started to hear this from the dev community, and we realised how common this problem has become.
It struck me as wasteful that we were all standing up our own solutions - grab an editor, some version control, user accounts, etc. The cost of maintenance is incredible when you think of the dev time going into it. But that's the easy part. The shifting trends of documentation mean it's just not enough to dump a "user manual" with each major release.
Teams need to be able to write modular content quickly, with realtime collaboration across the organisation. Then they need to be able to access the existing content through a common and version controlled repository, and finally have the ability to push this to all the multiple outputs that the company requires.
One of the areas I think technical writing has failed to deliver is in the "M" part of CMS. At the moment it basically doesn't exist. A wiki is where good content goes to die. It's a nightmare to maintain, as I learned at Red Hat when I took over the MRG Grid docs suite - a product used by the CERN project at the time. Maintaining that was intense, and working closely with our beta community on maintenance automation we've heard how common this issue is. Early days, definitely something we're working on with the wider community - and not just technical writers but the developer community building and maintaining this infra as well.
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Suzanne Nguyen
@stringstory · A curious geek of the future
@davedri Thanks for sharing a deep dive with us. I beginning to understand why documentation is key to the success of a business, especially for scale.
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