For over a year now, I’ve been working as a technical writer in a tech startup developing a workflow automation tool. I’ve been part of a Developer Relations (DevRel) team, then a Marketing team, as well as some Product in-between. This organization means that I had to (re)learn how to collaborate efficiently across teams with different strategies, and commnicate the value of technical writing for achieving different goals.
One thing that helped me in this challenge was diving into different resources on these topics. In the spirit of sharing knowledge with other fellow technical writers, here’s a list of books, podcasts, and courses around technical writing:
Books
Technical writing
- Docs for Developers by Jared Bhatti et al. offers a walk-through the entire software documentation process, from understanding users to publishing and maintaining docs. (Bonus points: it includes illustrations of corgies.)
- The Product is Docs by Christopher Gales and the Splunk Documentation Team takes Docs for Developers a step further by including best practices from the Splunk team and chapters about how technical writers can work with different teams (Support, Marketing, Engineering, Product, UX/Design, and remote).
- Docs like Code by Anne Gentle
- Every Page is Page One by Mark Baker
General writing
- The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker is a modern guide on how to read and write clearly, that gets into the nitty-gritty details of the English language from a linguistics and cognitive science perspective.
- On Writing Well by William Zinsser is an oldie but goldie among books dedicated to the art of writing non-fiction, and includes a chapter about technical writing.
- The Elements of Style by Strunk/White is, to any English major and (aspiring) writer, a reference book on grammar and style rules (though some are outdated by now), with the maxim “Remove unnecessary words!”
DevRel teams
- The Business Value of Developer Relations by Mary Thengvall is a manual on how to build, manage, and measure the success of a DevRel team.
- Developer Marketing and Relations by Caroline Lewko is a practical guide on working at the intersection of DevRel and Marketing, with concrete good and bad examples from big tech companies.