admin – techwriterly

Pies Acquired

Headed back to Spilt Milk Pastry bright and early this morning to pick up our Christmas pie pre-orders. Number one grandson is with his dad this weekend, otherwise I would’ve taken him along – he’s my human social media app. Although I chatted with other customers in line, I’m painfully shy and it’s an effort for me. Hence my New Year’s resolutions.

Photo of the front window of the Spilt Milk Pastry bakery in Oak Park, Illinois.

I got us a Chocolate Peppermint (our go-to classic) and Cranberry Dutch Custard with Walnut Crumble, which we’ve never tried before but sounded pretty amazing when I was selecting pies to order.

Two pies side by side on a counter. Left: Chocolate peppermint. Right: Cranberry custard walnut.

Journey to Admin: Back to It

My PTO is slipping away and I haven’t studied as much as I wanted to. Back at it this evening.

New Year’s Resolutions 2025

I mentioned elsewhere that I’m living in a full house right now. It’s me, my daughter, her partner, and their three sons (all ages 5 and under) in my small condo. Earlier this year they were unceremoniously kicked out of their other home (a story for another time), so I’m helping them until they can get back on their feet.

Because my daughter and her partner are juggling the needs of a kindergartner, a toddler, and an infant, I often pitch in with parenting duties. For example, each night I read a story to my eldest grandson before bedtime.

This nightly routine has become more interactive as my grandson has memorized his favorite story. I read, he recites from memory, though he is learning to recognize some of the words.

The book is Rox’s Secret Code, by Mara Lecocq and Nathan Archambault. It’s about a coder girl who makes toys come to life through programming. After her dad sees her messy room and threatens to take away her computer, she builds a Chorebot (which then quickly runs amok).

One of her other robot creations is is the Mischief Bot, which does exactly the opposite of what you tell it to do (a lot like my eldest grandson 😉).

What does a children’s book have to do with New Year’s resolutions? In 2025, I too have decided to be more like Mischief Bot and do the exact opposite of my “programming” (i.e., as a shy introvert).

With that in mind, here are my resolutions for the year.

1. Be an active participant in a local empty nesters’ group. Although I’m not technically an empty nester at the moment, my daughter is grown. The group comprises folks my age in the community who meet for book discussion, local concerts, lunches, etc. I’ve already started on this one by volunteering to help plan events.

2. Network in person instead of just online. I’m planning to attend as many local tech comm and writing/editing related events as I can.

3. Build a YouTube channel. I’m in the process of setting up my home studio and will start posting videos in the new year. The primary topic will be tech comm.

4. Get involved in community organizing. I’m not sure how to go about this just yet but am looking into it.

5. Volunteer at the farmers market over the summer.

So, those are my primary resolutions. The following are secondary and a bit more mundane.

* Read at least 24 books. Two per month to start, more if I can.

* Go vegetarian. As part of this my daughter, her partner and I have been talking about growing vegetables and kitchen herbs on the balcony next spring/summer.

* Get out for daily walks around town with my daughter and the kids. A while back there was a hashtag for this — #StetWalk.

And that’s it for now. I will post periodic updates in 2025 and report back on all of the above next December.

Journey to Admin: Final Push Before Exam

I’ve been studying for my Salesforce Admin I certification since the summer. Currently, I’m on holiday break and making a final push to prepare for the exam, which I hope to schedule December 31st.

Study Goals

I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the material overall but still need to drill down into some of the details. To that end, I’m following an Admin course by Emily and Jeremy Call from start to finish. I’ve already taken Salesforce Ben and Focus on Force courses.

Much of the Calls’ course will be review, but there are two areas where I feel I’m weakest: Data and Analytics Management, and Workflow/Process Automation. These are two out of seven total sections on the exam, all of which are weighted by percentage.

With Salesforce cert prep in general, there is so much material to go through it’s important to approach it strategically. In this final leg of my cert prep journey, my strategy is to fill in gaps. I’m taking notes in each section as a refresher, reading through Salesforce documentation on topics that I’m least familiar with, and reviewing glossaries to create flash cards.

Planning to post about my progress each day until the exam.

How Some Technical Writers Use AI

For Context and Background

I started following Tom Johnson’s blog in 2016. I credit him with helping me relaunch my career in tech comm after a layoff in 2009 and several years struggling as an underemployed single mother. He always has his ear to the ground and writes about “trends” before they become trends.

More recently, I’ve connected with a number of other technical writers on social media, including Fabrizio Benedetti. He’s based in Barcelona, enjoys retro tech, and writes thoughtful posts about the profession.

Both men are on the developer docs side. While I focus on end user docs, their content and opinions are still valuable to me (plus there’s a lot of crossover between the two types of tech comm, at least at a high level).

So when they post about how they use AI in their jobs, I read with interest.

My Love-Hate Relationship with AI

On a personal note, I have yet to find a use for AI in my tech comm job, although I do play around with it in my personal life, and I’m training on Salesforce’s Agentforce (a topic for another time).

But in my role as a Technical Content Manager, there is one huge show stopper that prevents me from engaging with AI at all, and that is data privacy.

The company I work for builds B2B software products, and our user documentation is protected by a client login. I cannot expose that documentation in any way to open source AI — whether it’s Claude.ai or the OxygenXML Positron Assistant, which is built on the OpenAI API. If I did, I would have to agree to release proprietary information into the public domain.

Although some newer content management systems (CMSs) incorporate AI “copilots” or “assistants” that don’t expose your data, those tools are just laughably expensive. One tool developer quoted me $85K a year for a subscription to their cloud-based CMS.

Technical Writer Posts on Using AI

My personal experience is only one use case — your mileage may vary as they say. With that in mind, I wanted to share three posts about AI use cases from other technical and content writers:

A Note on ‘Luddites’

“Luddite” has been a pejorative for as long as I can remember, conjuring up images of old men shaking their fists at clouds.

But the original Luddite movement was not anti-technology at all. It was pro working class and promoted socially responsible progress vs. exploitation of resources and people.

For an excellent discussion on the history of this movement, check out the following interview from the Majority Report.

Does Everything in Tech Need to Be a ‘Revolution’?

This is an early morning hot take with more questions than answers. It’s a response to a LinkedIn piece I read over the weekend — Why Technical Writing Needs Its Next DOCX Moment. I don’t agree with a lot of it, though it’s not my intent to call out or criticize the author. I just wanted to push back against an overly rosy “I drank the Kool-Aid” view of AI, especially as it relates to tech comm.

As technical writers, we are not required to jump on bandwagons or cheerlead for every emerging technology. It’s okay to hang back behind the marching band and the baton twirlers. Healthy skepticism and asking questions are part of the job.

Some of my questions are:

Is AI a “revolutionary game changer” or a glorified automation tool?
If it’s the latter, if AI is merely a next gen automation tool, what’s wrong with that? Why does every technological advancement need to be “revolutionary”?
Why aren’t incremental changes or enhancements good enough, as long as they’re beneficial to end users?

Despite the fact that the AI bubble burst earlier this year, the big tech firms are racing to outdo each other to build gargantuan data centers plus dedicated nuclear power plants to keep them going, as they continue to make false promises about the technology. That sounds utterly insane to me.

I am not opposed to AI or any other new technology per se. I just think we need cooler heads to prevail over the more mercenary impulses of the tech industry. Technical writers (in our advocacy for users) and tech journalists (who help shape the larger discourse) can and should inject a healthy dose of critical thinking into the mix.

A Quiet Thanksgiving

I’m thankful for a quiet and small Thanksgiving gathering this year. We kept it simple — roast chicken because we’re not big fans of turkey, slow cooker stuffing, homemade cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, gravy. (I was too busy cooking to snap photos of everything.)

Yesterday I got up early to fetch our preordered pies from Spilt Milk Pastry in Oak Park. Staff made the cold a little more bearable with free coffee for everyone in line.

I took number one grandson with me. He wore a hat he made at school, chatted with other customers, and petted a dog named Gracie. He’s like a human social network.

Once we got inside I bought him an M&M cookie and chocolate milk.

Here are the pies – one pumpkin and one pecan. We enjoyed them both with homemade whipped cream. The leftover pie is not going to last long!

Hello (Tech Comm) World!

Welcome to the Techwriterly blog. My name is Katy and I’m a technical writer living in the Chicago area.

Next to cooking and baking, technology is the topic I’m nerdiest about (especially computer software and hardware). I tool around with PCs the way some people tinker with their cars. But it’s not because I’m a natural engineer. I’m not. I just figure things out through determination and dumb luck.

Ultimately my curiosity and problem solving skills led me to where I am now in my career: A Technical Content Manager for a software company.

Although I’m not new to blogging per se (my career dates back to the 1990s and the advent of the World Wide Web), I am new to consistent and successful blogging. That is, I’ve never actually done the hard work to build a blog or a community, or attract an audience.

It’s like people who say “I want to write a novel someday.”

I say that about blogging. Also novels.

Why am I blogging?

The tech sector is getting hit with mass layoffs and I may be starting a freelance business soon if my job status changes.

Currently I’m employed full time and very happy, with nothing to promote. However, I know that I’ll be forced to completely reorient my thinking if I lose my job. I’m trying to do that now before a crisis hits (or at least to prevent or mitigate that crisis).

What am I blogging about?

Technical communications (tech comm) is a huge subject. There are many niche roles in this industry. Mine happens to be user documentation for software — more specifically, higher education software apps built on the Salesforce platform.

I plan to cover software user documentation and all it entails from that angle.

Who am I writing for?

Honestly I don’t know yet. Other technical writers? Potential freelance clients? Tech comm newcomers? I’m still giving this some thought. I spend a lot of time on Reddit reading through the threads. Hoping to generate some ideas from there, just for starters, and answer some of the commonly asked questions.

What are my blogging goals?

My goals are fairly mundane: Writing practice, showcasing expertise, and helping others through my posts. I’d like to build my business and attract an audience organically, over time.