Devrelshow Episode 25 - William Imoh  ## Metadata - Author: [[Frédéric Harper]] - Full Title: Devrelshow Episode 25 - William Imoh - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #developerAdvocacy - #technicalWriting - #contentStrategy Author: Merlin Source: [Merlin's YouTube Channel](https://merlin.foyer.work) Reference: [Video Transcript](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfqnaYssa24) date created: 2024-10-20 20:45 --- # Title: The Role of Technical Writing in Developer Advocacy: Insights from William Imoh ## Table of Contents:  - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#-notes) - [📖 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging) Assessment](#-deib-diversity-equity-inclusion-and-belonging-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#-seo-evaluation) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### References: - [Merlin’s YouTube Video](https://merlin.foyer.work) ## 📝 Summary: In this episode of DevRelShow, William Imoh shares his journey into developer advocacy and technical writing, exploring how critical written content is in driving product adoption and growth. He discusses key strategies for creating valuable technical content, the importance of understanding audience personas, and how developers can transition into full-time writing roles while balancing AI's rise in content creation. The episode provides actionable insights for both technical writers and developer advocates. ## 📖 Main Content: William Imoh explains how his experience in web development and technical content creation led him to found Hack Mamba, a company focused on helping software teams grow through developer-centric writing. William highlights the significance of creating content tailored to different stages of the buyer’s journey, emphasizing storytelling, technical expertise, and SEO considerations. He also talks about the growing role of AI in content writing, stressing that while AI can assist, human writers remain essential for creating nuanced, product-focused content. ### 🗒️ Notes: - **Developer Advocacy Journey**: William began as an indie developer advocate, writing content and organizing meetups. - **Hack Mamba**: His company provides content for software teams, focusing on documentation and technical marketing. - **AI in Technical Writing**: AI is useful for assisting, but quality content requires human storytelling and expertise. - **Content Funnels**: Understanding top, middle, and bottom-funnel content is key to driving user engagement and conversions. - **Technical Writer Skills**: Code proficiency, SEO knowledge, and user persona understanding are essential for success. - **Content Optimization**: Regularly update content to reflect new product features and maintain accuracy. ## 📖 References: - [Merlin YouTube Transcript](https://merlin.foyer.work) ## 🗣️ Paraphrase:  1. William emphasizes that the foundation of technical content creation lies in understanding the developer’s journey and their specific context when integrating new tools. Rather than focusing solely on product details, successful content should consider the user’s goals and challenges. 2. He also highlights the importance of continuous learning for technical writers, pointing out that writing well isn’t enough—you need to understand SEO, marketing funnels, and how to tailor content for specific user personas. ## 📰 Newsletter: 🎉 **Developer Advocacy: The Future of Technical Writing** In this week's issue, we dive deep into the growing role of technical writing in developer advocacy, featuring insights from William Imoh, founder of Hack Mamba. Learn how AI is reshaping content creation (spoiler: human writers are still essential!) and discover new strategies for creating effective technical content that drives product adoption. Plus, tips on writing better documentation and updates on the latest WordPress plugins and tools. Don’t miss it! 👉 [Read more](#) ## ✅ Action Items: As a Developer Advocate with a strong educational background, integrating William’s approach to content creation into your advocacy strategy aligns perfectly with your goals. Focus on helping contributors improve their technical documentation skills, while promoting sustainable open-source development through educational content. Use insights from Hack Mamba's methodology to enhance transparency and inclusivity in the WordPress ecosystem. ## 🧪 Hypotheses: - Technical writing focused on product-specific challenges leads to faster integration times. - AI-generated content will remain less effective than human-written content for developer-centric needs due to its lack of real-world context. ### 📊 Methodology: - **Case Study Analysis**: Compare user engagement and satisfaction between AI-generated content and human-written technical guides. - **Surveys**: Gather feedback from developers on the usability of documentation that includes storytelling versus standard API references. ### ❓ Questions: - How can AI assist in creating top-of-funnel content without sacrificing the personal touch of human writers? - What tools can be developed to better support technical writers in tailoring content for specific developer personas? ### 🔮 Future Research: Research could focus on how AI-driven content platforms might assist technical writers in speeding up repetitive tasks while preserving the quality and personal touch in complex areas such as API documentation and developer tutorials. ### 💡 Implications:  If AI can be harnessed effectively for content creation, the time saved on lower-level writing tasks could allow human writers to focus on higher-level strategic content. This would advance the field of technical writing, making it both more efficient and personalized. ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment: 1. **Visual Learners (Spatial)**: - **Present**: The article includes some diagrams and visual cues, but more infographics on content funnels and user personas could improve comprehension. - **Improve**: Incorporate flowcharts that depict the content creation process and its role in the developer journey. 2. **Aural Learners (Auditory-Musical)**: - **Present**: Opportunities for auditory learners are limited. - **Improve**: Consider adding podcast episodes or audio summaries to make the material more accessible. 3. **Verbal Learners (Linguistic)**: - **Present**: The content is descriptive and includes strong examples. - **Improve**: Further enrich with analogies and deeper storytelling elements. 4. **Physical Learners (Kinesthetic)**: - **Improve**: Suggest hands-on exercises like writing API documentation or creating a tutorial. 5. **Logical Learners (Mathematical)**: - **Present**: Step-by-step progressions in content funnels and developer personas are provided. - **Improve**: Include more case studies and data points to appeal to analytical learners. 6. **Social Learners (Interpersonal)**: - **Present**: Engagement opportunities in the form of discussions or collaboration aren’t explicitly encouraged. - **Improve**: Encourage group discussions around improving technical writing. 7. **Solitary Learners (Intrapersonal)**: - **Present**: Reflection points are present but could be expanded with journaling prompts or individual assessments. 8. **Naturalistic Learners**: - **Present**: Limited reference to environmental or nature-based analogies. - **Improve**: Use nature-based analogies to explain content funnels or content growth patterns. ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment: - **Screen Reader Compatibility**: Ensure all images and diagrams include alt-text descriptions for better accessibility. - **Keyboard Navigation**: Content appears navigable, but ensuring that all interactive elements are accessible via keyboard could improve usability. - **Contrast and Readability**: Ensure high contrast for readability, particularly for users with visual impairments. - Document Tags: [[devrel]] - Summary: Join Fred, and his guest William Imoh, Founder of Hackmamba, while they discuss all things developer relations, and learn best practices about technical writing, and how to start + be successful in this field. - URL: https://youtube.com/live/TfqnaYssa24?si=loowydBE77zorycf [Music] [Applause] [Music] I know I know I'm still dancing welcome to to the Devo show another episode of the Devo show uh always excited you know me always happy to do that show uh now you also know the fact that like I still didn't took the time to clean up my background there's still all those wire that look like like I'm I'm I'm not a good Tech person right now if you look at like all those rers behind me not being probably set up but things are working and it's just life being life right now so I'm not ashamed my background okay a little bit uh it could be better but anyway anyway again always happy to do the devil show because um if it's the de show with Fred that show is really not about me it's about the guest and I'm lucky serly I always have amazing people with me and today's not different I have William with me how is life William thank you so much Fred for having me on the show I'm super excited by the way I think your cables are not doing as bad as they could be but uh it's it's really nice to be here and uh yeah Life's good out here in Oso yeah Oso um I I was uh telling William before the show like I've never been to ow uh that's on my list of places I want to visit but if I want to be honest and really transparent every time someone talks to me about a place I've never been I was like yeah it's on my list of place I want to go because I I would love to visit like every corner of the world it just does not happen uh because you know again life but uh it's really also really on my list since a long time I was supposed to go at some point when it was at fifth bit and it just did not happen my colleague went uh instead of me uh so I was a little bit jealous but happy for him uh that he had that opportunity but uh yeah with that said um happy to have you on the show William thanks for being on the show uh it's always a real pleasure and with that said please tell me who are you W that's uh that's an interesting question uh shouldn't be as difficult but basically I'm William and I'm founder of hack M I typically spend my days helping others be better at hack mber and what does hack member do we help software teams write technical content so content to help them acquire software engineering or developer users and also enable them either with the right uh marketing content or developer documentation that's what hakm does when agency and I just lead the team out there uh asides that um here out here in Norway I'm either traveling um I'm learning to fly planes so I do that when the weather is in shitty um I yeah I play basketball like I just did this this evening and I just go out to drink beer sometimes that's it I love that I love that um you know uh we're going to come back a little bit about you know your your company I want to learn more about uh exactly what you do um as mentioned in the description of the show so we're going to talk about technical writing uh you know if I want to be totally enough the first time you reach out to me and it was like hey Fred like uh you're looking for a guest would like to be on the show and I look at your profile and I was like yeah he's not a developer Advocate and like this show I was like I want to get developer Advocates on the show and I had that idea for one second after that I looked at your profile and was like oh no that Fred you're stupid like yes like he does not have like the developer Advocate title but like this is part of what he is doing with this business uh you know you were like in developer experience you were a technical writer yourself uh you know product management um like like you did a lot of Ro and and and if now I'm looking at your because I have a memory but like uh in in your LinkedIn profile uh a couple years ago though you were technical rider uh Slash uh developer Advocate I Scotch scotch.io uh I would like to learn a little bit about that that experience you basically stayed there three years and if I remember Scotch Dio was like website with like a lot of tutorials and documentation I think digital ocean acquir Scotch that iio when I was there so it's why I remember yeah oh so you know cre s then yes yeah oh yeah fantastic guy uh so yeah I it's called this was I think where I started like my career in Tech so I've done everything from technical writing developer advocacy software engineering product management everything except product design but I did start out as a self-thought engineer um taught myself web development and then I figured I could write so I could write about the stuff I was learning so I started writing you know everything and anything from JavaScript methods I think if I go back to 2016 2017 I was writing about react map and reduce functions on medium um and that's how I met Chris sea also through my other friend called Chris code Beast um and I would contribute to like Scotch articles and then at some point Chris was like hey uh could you help me like manage things a bit more so manage authors review content help create content post up content for some of like our partners then I did all of that and asides writing I figured I could also talk about the Technologies as I learned them that's a great warning yeah actually you know what sorry about that you were talking and I realized that like one guest out of two they like they freaked out a little bit because like there's a warning sign and like they read it and after that most of them laugh but like I really should warn the guest that like hey you know there is a ban here it's not a real warning it's just a joke like everything is going well the show is going well so sorry about that yeah no worries uh it's no worries so um I I figured I could talk about you know content and technical writing and also organized communities so that was the next thing I did was I'm from Nigeria originally and in Nigeria there I started organizing communities of you know developers JavaScript developers angular devs we would have these meetups that went from you know 200 people and you know the last couple of meetups were around like 800 900 people and was still a meet up uh so while doing this I was also talking about products that I liked uh I wasn't necessarily selling them but at that time I was talking about cloudinary um I loved ozero so I was just wearing like their merch anyone that looked at me I told them I preach of zero to them that's when we had like developer what preachers what do we even call ourselves then was it maybe te like like developer evangelist evangelist yeah it was like developer evangelist exactly so I would talk about anything and everything paid or not and uh I would spend my money to you know go to conferences and meetups and talk about Technologies I have zero affiliation with but uh over time these companies reached out to say hey you're doing this thing at this Meetup uh could you talk about our two and we give you like some bucks I'm always uh always happy to to do that so I was sort of like an indie developer Advocate at that time uh just Shilling products uh traveling to the us talking about communities in Africa building with the jam stock then um teaching people you know organizing Community volunteering as well that was a lot of like a huge part of what I did uh at that time so that was my developer Advocate experience and all through I was also writing technical content probably written like a ton of technical articles to to date um I think I Peak I was writing what eight to 10 blog posts a month by hand wow yeah and there was no AI then so there was no way I could generate all that I was writing them tutorials top of funnel content by hand and and and oh there are so many things I wonder I wanted to talk about with everything You' said so the first thing just the last thing you said uh you know if you don't write technical tutorial you may have heard William say like oh I was writing a like technical cultural per month and then your ad is like n it's like two per weeks but like it's a lot of work like if you want to write like a proper good technical depth tutorial you need to like you may have some expertise but like when you write those things you don't have expertise and everything so you need to like learn a little bit be sure that like what you're going to write Mak sense you need to think about the structure of your tutorial you need to write it down you need to do the code example you may even like leave I don't know a get up like repo with some like of the code that people can use them you need to test those things you need to do like maybe some graphics to go there choose to write image you need to review your stuff like there is a lot of work to have like a proper like great tutorials that you need to do so like eight for me eight tutorial per per month is is an amazing number so I just wanted to be sure that like people understand that like it's it's it's not a small feature it's a it's a lot of work yeah and uh it was uh and and again that was how um that was how I started hack M from writing this many content and it were really good that I kept getting more like you know requests to create even more and I figured oh I I cannot do this alone but maybe I could scale this into a company and um yeah that's how hm was born creating high quality technical content a lot of them that's I like that that's a great story because you know you I want to come back to actman but just just before um I go to other things um you know it's like you saw you saw that what you were doing was providing values to people but you were like hey you know what I can do more like I I would like to do more but I can do more and the solution is like to build a business around it to continue to provide value to more people so I really like it's a great story but um before like going to like specifically talking about a company uh because I want learn more um you know you were talking two things that that I wanted to come back uh the first one you were talking about like you're from Nigeria and uh you were talking about the community there uh it's another place on my list um that I would like to go I know I said like every placees but this one for real um because uh at a PR Company when I had a team uh the first person that I hired was a technical writer and she was from Nigeria so I I never been there but I had a small taste like the Tech Community there and she was sharing stuff with me and the community there is like is incredible you just say like oh we had meet up with 200 people I'm like what the heck like we don't even have that in San Francisco most of the time where like it's the tech Hub and the place to be uh if you're Tech folks and like the community there were like from again I've never been there but from what I've seen in the web on Twitter what uh like my Nigerian friends like share with me like it's all lovely people that just want to help every other people and they want you to be successful and they care about the technology and they care about people and I I just wanted to highlight that uh because I think it's it's there are places in the world um I had the chance to travel a lot and to work because of my job I had the chance to work with community in different countries where even places where I didn't like set a foot physically and and Nigerian are like amazing like it's amazing Tech Community there yeah yeah it is it's it's massive I mean there 200 million people so the likelihood of finding a like a large um Community is uh is a lot higher so yeah they're they really ambitious people as well so a lot of people interested in technology yeah and and good people in Tech uh I mean um I would tell like like the sometime the struggle from people I know in ner is that like they like to work for a tech company and usually you would prefer for different reasons like maybe trying to work for a us-based company uh and and it's difficult because people see like the time zone difference or you're not in the same country but I highly encourage you if you have the chance hire someone from that country like amazing people really great resources like if you can deal with like a little bit of time zone difference if you can do like essing uh some essing discussion I mean uh when I had my my technical writer she was in Nigeria uh we had about three four hours per day together and the rest of the time we're not really working at the same time but it was more than enough to sync and be sure we're going in the right direction and me help her to be successful and her like telling me like what she needs to be successful so uh again it's just me like trying to I want everybody to get hired but um I know it's often a little more difficult where you're in remote country there's not like central part of Europe or in North America let's say so but like give a chance to uh actually not even a chance it's like you just give uh yeah give a chance to amazing people not not because like they deserve it they're just amazing folks I don't know sorry I'm I'm babbling right now but like it was important to me to kind of like say that because I had such a great experience and and the community there is just amazing yeah it is and I know um time zones are never you know a problem for Nigerians especially when you take reot work during my time we would work 12 14 hours that was like regular work day um because you know you would have to start working from anywhere from 2: to 4:00 p.m. and you would just continue to 12:00 a.m. and that's normal that's that's a normal day uh no one's complaining no one I promise you no one's complaining I know I was the one complaining I was like no stop doing that like it's fine if we only work together like two three hours like try to work like quote unquote normal hours for you like you need to have a life outside work but it's totally true um I was going against because I was like no you need to have like a work life balance but uh yeah no no that's that that's kind of the reality um you know the the the last thing from the the first like moment you started to talk a little bit about your experience you know you were talking about like all those things that you were doing on your own kind of like a handy developer Advocate and I feel like most developer Advocates we started like that like we started to do like those like oh helping at me Toops or or starting to speak a little bit or starting to write some article on our own because we are passionate about like sharing what we know helping other people and I feel like you went through that path like like many many folks who who went from like I do this on my free time to like holy like I'm getting paid to do that yeah I think I think it's important to talk about that yeah yeah you're right um I think is at least now I understand it better but there isn't a university for where you can go study developer advocacy or developer relations right so the best you can do is combine a lot of all these skills get as much proof as possible that you can show someone right um I don't know what an entry-level developer Advocate looks like if there is even a job like that because you require some expertise beforehand right so there isn't really like entrylevel developer Advocate you you developer advocacy starts from like midlevel at least and what entry level developer advocacy looked like was what I I think I was doing then which was volunteering for communities writing a ton of Articles again creating content speaking at events um volunteering to facilitate and all these were typically most times for free building a portfolio just talking on Twitter helping amplify stuff if anyone says anything I'm just looking for how to help and how to provide value and all these I just kept you know acquiring social credit as my buddy Baba once told me is you you just keep acquiring this social credit from uh from people without knowing it unconsciously and over time it builds up and before you know it someone is offering you a job as a developer Advocate and they expect you to have um like experience doing XYZ things but you've never had a job as a developer Advocate uh but this isn't an entrylevel position either way um so those bits I feel like that's why a lot of people at least looking to get started with developer advocacy should consider is create da of content find a community be part of it contribute to open source uh I used to talk about Gatsby a lot I became a maintainer from that at some point um yeah and just do stuff do free stuff someone will pay you for for it eventually that's usually the rule of the streets as I like to see it yeah no I agree as much as like part of me a to say like do free stuff because like uh I mean like you need to get money for a living I it's it's kind of like the way to go but be be intelligent or wise about how you do free stuff do free stuff that is public so once someone knock at your door or you knock at someone's door and like you're looking to have a job you're like hey you know what I don't have like professional experience per se but oh hey look at those like public articles on like de medium on my own blog or look at like the project that I put on GitHub or look at like the recording of my talk at that conference that is on YouTube so all those things that are like try to make them public because um that's currency that you can use to show you have some experience like it used to be a time not not with developer advocacy but like uh when I started as a software developer you needed a formal diploma to get a job it was Unthinkable to get a job without a diploma even if it was like a basic or not a B in my case it was a basic diploma it was kind of like a the equivalent of like a college degree but like it was only one year without the common courses or like you know philosophy English maths and those things it was like just software development but I had a diploma so you didn't absolutely need to go to university but you needed the diploma today as for developers um um some company will require you diplomas I think it's most of the time but um in the end it's more about proving that you can do the job but with developer advocacy as you said William there is no school out there about that there is no diploma you can get so you need to build your credibility by doing those kind of things and yes at the beginning it means doing it for free uh hopefully you have fun also doing them but you build your credibility you build your experience and that give you that opportunity and I really love the I really love like like like what you said you know you build uh how do you say that you build social credit social credit social credit yeah so um when I was talking that made me talk about when I was talking about those things before um I I called that basically you work on your personal branding but like I I like the social credit part but this is basically how I got my first job I know folks if it's not the first time you're looking at uh your watching the dev R show are repeating myself but um it's basically I was talking to someone in a coffee chat recently about my experience and I was like it's Microsoft that knocked at my door at some point and I said like hey you know what we're looking for someone in Montreal you live in Montreal uh we asked around and your name come up a couple of time and I was like what the why how my name come up and after I thought about it I was like you know what I was attending some meet Toops I was talking to people I started to give talks I was writing blog post I was active within my community so I probably created like those kind of like social credits and people are like hey you know Fred is not a bad guy Fred is helping us or Fred spoke this or Fred has an expertise in this and that and they knock on my door and they say like hey you know what uh you're kind of doing the job of a developer Advocate on your free time would like to be paid to do it yeah and I said no the formul you did you said no I for real the the real story is that I said no because you know uh it was uh I don't know 12 years ago 13 years ago I wanted to do that job but not on Microsoft because at that time you know Microsoft was the evil company like I was more like more like the open source type of person and I said no the first time and it reached out to me a second time and I was like no I don't think so and and they were good the third time they reach out to me they were like hey you know we have that guy uh from her team uh is going to be in Montreal uh he would like to go for coffee with you and on top of that um I was not speaking English at all so it was like this guy is a French cuqua speak French his first language is French so you won't even have to force yourself you can have like a natural discussion it cut you nothing to do that and I was like uh okay maybe I can go have a coffee with that guy and the guy was amazing and they basically sold me the job because the job was not to be a Microsoft person my job was to be open source guy a open data guy within Microsoft and I was like okay now I can naively try to change things within Microsoft which is like really hard to do when you're not on the top because like it's a big boat that you need to turn around which is nearly impossible but I I I hope I made my my marks a little bit like I Tred to influence things a little bit at my level but uh yeah know sorry about that long story to say like I said No at the beginning and actually that was a pretty good job I mean like they really my team uh until two years or two years and a half after in the row we changed uh manager his vision changed but like until there my team was really like hey Fred like we need to be more open we need to work better with other project we need to talk about open source we need to be more open source we need to play well with other people and that was a pretty good job that was really formative too uh because that was my first job and uh mostly everywhere I was going people hated me because I was working at the evil company so it was a good practice for working in places where it was a little bit easier to do my job yeah yeah um so now I'm sorry I always said like okay let's talk about hack Mano after let's talk and now now I feel it's a time um uh I want to learn more about the company um you know first maybe maybe a little bit of um yeah I know you already talked about that I was going to say like maybe a little bit of history about how you created you you tell us the story a little bit but uh it's been like nearly four years now uh you're still there you're still the founder CEO so I assume things are going well uh so so what's the company uh itself I I like the description on LinkedIn you know uh it's it's it may feels marketing but I really love it it's like helping software teams Drive Revenue growth and product adoption through written product focused technical content which which I just love so uh talk to us a little bit about the company like what what is your service offering uh what are you doing what type of customer you working uh everything you want to share I'm just curious about it yeah uh thanks thanks for that um so with hak Mamba again I started it out of the need to fix broken technical content out there I read a lot of blog posts that were very like heavy on the marketing side um or they were just heavy on the product side uh so the team didn't get any value from it or the users didn't get any value from it and when I wrote I fixed that I fixed that by passively selling uh the product but also being like very educative and teaching basically and that's why I got a lot of people reaching out to say hey like right for us when I couldn't handle it I decided to find technical writers that are Engineers first so they have a good technical background I know the writing part uh that would come over time as they write and they learn and will make like very strict reviews they learn so I put together a team of like 10 authors and that's how the company started I started parttime in 2021 um and I did it part-time for two years two years plus until last year in August I left my job as a product manager um and then I decided to work on full time I was like I need to do this I need to be ser put the clap in I know iate like the move to like part-time to full-time I mean like that's that's a great achievement congratulation on that yeah thanks um I I figured if I want to grow this because I still saw the demand for it right for uh great technical content it would always be there in my opinion um but also around the same time last year that's when we got all the AI buzz and gp4 I think was either launch or was just in corner and everyone I knew was like hey William you're out of business you said you don't want to work in McDonald's you're definitely going there not any shade to people that work in McDonald's but you're not going to have a job soon and um I I asked myself why did I start hack in the first place and it was to create original technical content written by Engineers that are great writers for other engineers so we stop with our ethos which is we're going to create original technical content for SAS teams and we work with SAS teams in two ways we either work with the marketing team or the product team on the marketing side we're creating content across the buyer uh Journey or funnel whatever anyone wants to call it but basically it's either top of funnel middle of funnel or bottom of funnel content to drive awareness consideration and decision on the buyer side and the buyers typically are developers um only couple for a couple of our partners do we have the buyers be you know um non-technical folks this is on the marketing side on the product side we help teams create great documentation right so we look at someone's documentation and we're like no this is developers are clawing their eyes out uh you can definitely do better uh so we come in we restructure the docks we uh map out the developer joury we take like a task based or an intent based approach to redoing the structure of the documentation then we actually write the content put fixing like Telemetry so we know when what works and what doesn't and at the end of the day what we get is faster integration times on the product side we get happier developers that not smashing keyboards because they just cannot integrate with the company on the marketing side our partners are getting more developers they're getting uh better uh discovery on their product so they're ranking for some high value keywords that are targeted at developers and these keywords are typically or at least these content are like the typical SEO fluff we create differentiated SEO content where we're fusing like domain expertise into the content and it has to be educative if it's we say we are not an SEO agency that's like Baseline we all communicate internally so we only make SEO strong SEO considerations when we create content because the content has to be written from experience and research and we should be teaching so in uh that's a that's a long explanation of what hack M does but we basically help teams acquire and enable developers that's that that that is perfect because you were talking about your company but at the same time you were just talking also about writing the importance of like having great developer documentation the importance of having great comp content I mean um I I work at a place once where like they asked me to create like SEO specific contents and they didn't really care about the quality of the content it was like just we just want those keywords and I'm like that's not the way to go that's and like it's not it will probably work short terms but I'm not even sure if it's going to work I'm not even sure if you're going to be able to convert people that's just going to be like a pure bad SEO play so I like the fact that like you said hey content is is important and we're going to think about SEO when we do it but not the other way around we're like oh we're going to start with SEO and after that we're going to think about content so that's that's really important from my point of view and I I really appreciate that you said exactly that and I was like yeah that's that's the way to go especially because like also developer documentation is is undervalued so much by like different companies where like you know they're developer they're going to know how to use the product the product and like sometime it's true most of the time most of the time it's not I was giving a talk about developer documentation I don't know maybe a month ago at SEO navigate uh in Burton and um it was really about like your developer like the title was like developer documentation your secret weapon I mean like that and it was a talk about like basically highlighting the importance of great developer documentation with a lot of like quick tips and tricks about like okay you're not become like a technical writer after that talk but if you don't have anyone in that role or here here here's the thing that like are important that you think about and how you should think about when you write your documentation so um um it is you know that's so important yeah developer documentation is super important and one of the reasons I decided to double down on hack M actually like go fulltime was I worked at a company as a product manager in charge of integration and I saw how difficult it was to integrate it was a logistics tech company and I saw how difficult it was for the different like e-commerce systems I had different specifications to integrate with the system just because the docs wasn't like really great they had API specifications with parameters and all that stuff well written but then the developer Journey the experience of actually integrating considering the context of the developer that is integrating that was just completely missing most dogs just say me me me like here's my stuff here's my API here's how I've written my API here figure it out they don't think about the developer that's going to integrate with their solution and if I've learned anything in business it's that it's never about you it's never about what you've built or who you are it's about the person that's going to buy from you if you actually plan on selling at least so that's the approach we take to Dr mentation is how do we get someone out there who understand their context and then Rew write for them so I've seen like that's why folks praise Stripes documentation for instance because Stripes documentation wasn't written for engineers at stripe it was written for engineers outside stripe um so that's sort of how I think about documentation on a really high level I love that uh every time someone's talk about like you know document great documentation experience or great documentation example it's always like stripe pulio and get up like those three but stripe is always like the top number one that was in my talk when like because I know people always ask me like okay which documentation you can check and I always like for me it's like stripe poio get up but stripe is always there uh like their documentation is is really really good um yeah we we talked a lot and I know for the uh for the kind of like uh demo part uh you know there is like a technical writer role maps that you want to share about and a writing course curriculum so we're going to focus more like on the technical writing part which is important because like part of a developer Advocate Advocate Journey uh we have to do technical writing uh even when you have like technical writers team in your company you still do has developer Advocate some kind of writing so I think it's important but before we do that uh there's still one topic I want to talk about because you bring it up and I really want to have your opinion on that you talk about AI you talk about people telling you like hey you're going to lose your job and uh oh my God I want your opinion on that because I tried to a previous employer was like hey why are you spending time to write like those uh intro to specific topics document uh tutorials are actually blog post and I was like yeah they're important because people may not understand all the Technologies we use within our product so they need to understand that to like probably use their own product and they like just use AI and I did a test with chat GPT and I was like write me an article on Argo CD and that was like a big pit of fire I don't know how to describe that but that was like terrible and it was not even a complicated topic there was not even something like like there is a lot of information about it out there and I didn't have a great experience and I know I'm not the most AI friendly person so I may have bias when it comes to that but so it's why I want like a it's your full-time job to write documentation actually maybe a little less as a funer but it's still like your main focus this is what your business does what do you think about all those things like a AI when it comes to technical writing and like just just share your thoughts yeah uh first before I proceed I'd like to say I'm not a pessimist I actually organize the AI mad lab Meetup in Oslo so I organize it with the bunch of other guys it's the fastest growing Meetup like AI focused event here in Oslo so I'm really in the maybe not in the driving seat like I'm at least in the car so very optimistic about AI but then AI in content um for us it's been a blessing and it's been a blessing in the way that uh you probably wouldn't guess it's been a blessing the fact that it's help us it's helped us stand out um the moment GPD 4 came out we got like a huge search of new partners and folks that wanted us to create more original content for them okay and the reason was because it's become so easy to create content but so difficult to create high quality content and with AI a lot of teams will argue that or a lot of people would content creators will argue that if you create content with ar you can go in and edit it but this is them again looking at it from the Creator standpoint not the consumer standpoint as a consumer when you look at content and you're reading through it you just have a feeling that this isn't original this wasn't written by someone and there are a lot of like telltale signs from Context like having you know really recent context around the product for instance because we write technical content we're very product focused as you could see on on LinkedIn we always like Infuse product and you know with startups product context changes like every quarter most times um AI doesn't have that we're able to bring that into the content there's that and then there's a storytelling have you ever tried to ask GPD 4 to tell like tell you a story within like a particular theme it just goes like offboard right it doesn't it doesn't say like a person would right it doesn't understand that oh I do not mean storytelling by tell me like Moonlight Tales or bedtime stories but just say like construct words in a certain way that it's just easily digestible and you just love what you're reading there's that and then there's the UN kind value with AI that you just read something it's AI you're like no this is I'm not continuing even if it's valuable but you just feel like synthetic content isn't for you you want something from someone you want to learn something from someone and also people feel like why am I reading this here when I could just go to chat GPT and ask it exactly there's this is sub to deception people feel like they've just been deceived by being fed AI content when they could just get it themselves so for these reasons we've gotten a lot of our partners come to us and they very strict with their requirements we added in our contracts now to see we create only human written content we spend time to do that so we've actually outlawed AI usage at hack M we do not use it for outline creation for titles topics the actual content creation not for distribution not for strategy we say if we're unable to write the content so it's great we go and read so that we can write but we keep it original and that's that's our brand currently uh we're big um we're big fans of like AI we know it has a place but it has a place more as like a co-pilot to condense large amounts of data and say hey that's the key Point go think about this but it should just help you think better it shouldn't create for for you you do the creation that's what we believe at H and that's our approach to using AI at least so we're exploring AI for a lot of like all different use cases but still within the realm of uh is there something I've missed I should be thinking about is there uh a maybe a fact that I have you know maybe mistakenly um put out right and it just points that out so more of like a co-pilot that helps you think or helps you think better but you should do the original thinking and you should do the original creation that's how I think about Ai and what we do at hakm I love that I love that so so many good points and I don't love it just because you were basically telling we don't use I've heard that but uh no I I think it make it makes so much sense uh that's that's the problem also in in uh in oh no I'm not going there um sorry I I was thinking out loud about something like when it comes to developer but like I'm I'm really not going there actually you know it's time for me to shut up and I want you to uh show us the uh role map uh the technical writer role map that you have that you wanted to talk with us you know how to to start in the field so um again um useful for technical writer but I think that's going to be really useful for developer Advocate too yeah uh definitely I'll I'll share this and uh so I have this here I mean I love to give a bit of context as to why so we have this on road map. sh I'm basing platform amazing team um behind this as well I've used this personally to just look up what uh road maps in whatever career or whatever topic I'm technology topic I'm looking to get into or study uh so we decided to contribute a technical writing road map and we do this because we have a community of technical writers and we want to create content the right way and not just that technical writers are sometimes bounded by just writing tutorials or writing documentation but to be like a proper technical writer that can contribute to growth of an organization it's important to be well arounded or at least know what else you can study what does growth path look like for a technical writer what other side skills can you acquire as a technical writer so I decided to condense everything I know into this road map and uh we shared this in our community for folks getting started or even experienced technical writers or developer Advocates that want to um that want to write more so just going over this uh this this road map cuts across writing the really technical stuff to writing the the content for marketing to either acquire again make developers aware of a product help them consider buying that product or actually buy buying the product um I split this into different sections from you know just an introductory section for someone just starting out uh trying to understand who's the technical writer what's the role of technical writers what does growth for a technical writer looks like and because this is a road map it's sort of like a blueprint like a road map it doesn't have resources you go figure out like the rest it's basically just saying hey go and search this on this on Google that's what this is um so from introduction we're going into like required skills right I feel like technical writers should have some technology expertise to a really good extent if you want to be a well-rounded technical writer you have to know how to like write code this is our our thesis um others might argue you know otherwise but again if you want to be a well-rounded technical writer you should know how to code yeah so there's also language proficiency this is something we see people struggle with uh most of technical writing is done in English so um you're a better technical writer if you're a great English speaker um as well there's also written communication proficiency just knowing how to write how to write short sentences long sentences so I don't go into the details we go over like required skills then we go into tooling what tools do you use to write what tools do you use to edit where do you post content or or not how do you handle plag jism uh what format markdown for instance is the popular format or the the writing form of choice for technical writers that's something everyone should know SEO tools U there semrush there's ah refs um there's some other URL monitor all these different tools just to have them top of mine as like this is sort of like tooling I need as a technical writer now we get to sort of like the I would say my favorite part which is best practices love gems here uh most times when technical writers write they assume they're writing for developers so we go straight to the point they forget that it's great to tell a story a story that hooks the reader grabs the attention holds it and then ends with like a call to action leaves them with something leaves them with a feeling that's what stories do stories leave you feeling in some type of way at the end so how do you tell a good story and then how do you sell because with every technical content you create there has to be something in it for the company you're writing for or for you or for the tool or the product so how do you do that without just saying Hey try this to or hey sign up to this right how do you take a problem and then offer that to as a solution without actually selling do you need to provide alternatives to that do you need to make it a suggestion rather than you know U than a command for instance so looking at those crafting titles handling call to actions understanding user personas right not just user personas but user States developers come in different states senior developers there are senior developers who are currently developing there senior developers looking for general knowledge they senior developers um looking to explore just the domain of a certain tool for instance so they're all senior developers but they come in different different states and you need to understand that when writing that's something you need to think about writing style guides for instance as a technical writer you're going to receive these from teams what do you expect in a writing style guide and how do you follow one so we we went from these best practices to know to you know content research how do you What are keywords uh the average technical writer that writes only tutorials for a really long time just feels like content research ends in looking at GitHub issues stock overflow but then if if you're writing for a marketing team that wants to rank SEO wise they start to talk about keywords you need to know what those are uh you need to know how the topic you're choosing ranks with other topics so what's what's the topic score um so here we just putting integrities of conducting um content research then we moved into types of technical uh content I guess here this is where we have from developer documentation um this a bit warped here but there's developer docs API references are usually in developer documentation um although developer documentation is sort of like the body the body of work excuse me yeah so when talking about developer documentation uh that's one kind there also help content so what people sometimes call a knowledge base they're really using the developer documentation but it's technical content in there just not some with code um what parts of what parts make up documentation right what do you need to think about you need think about documentation structure API def definitions troubleshooting um also what tools are there to generate documentation Swagger open API spec that's something um to knowe then we get to technical content marketing now this is um these an interesting beit because here we're no longer looking at just writing tutorials for developers or documentation we're looking at how can we create content that drives business growth right to do that you need to understand an ICP an ideal customer profile and a buyer Persona right when you uh when you look at buyer personas for instance you start to hear things like an economic buyer and a technical buyer for instance uh you also hear things like Champions influencers and then the actual Buy these are things that technical writers have no idea of but they greatly influence the content that they create because then you know who you actually are writing for the exact problems they have and what the solution looks like for them what their day-to-day looks like in our end we usually think about what do their short-term goals look like what do their long-term goals look like what makes them successful what gets them promoted so these are some of the things to think about when coming up with when looking at the content especially if you're looking at uh a couple of content pieces not just one in isolation but um a number of content are fit in like a broader content strategy so um content funnel I talk to technical writers and tell them this content is um middle of funnel it's just supposed to help someone consider this two for the solution um so it's not for awareness neither is it for decision making and they're like so what exactly are you talking about um so understanding content funnels that also influences how you write content for uh for marketing influences what the call to action looks like because when you understand the content funnel you know what part or what stage of the funnel is the user in are they just shopping around or are they ready to buy makc sense um so we go from content uh marketing we go all the way to content SEO so some bits about SEO not all of it but what are backlinks how do you include them in what are short tail keywords or are longtail keywords and just SEO keywords in general um we put we laid out the funnels even better here so that at least the person could have like a a user of this road map understands uh how best to you know approach these so from P content to research uh reports on the M funnel again which is content that's to help Drive consideration of a solution right we have generic gated content white papers ebooks if you notice for anyone listening to this if you notice the content in mid funnel isn't really directing someone to sign up it's just attacking a problem and going a bit in depth to that problem that's why you have white papers and ebooks here bottom of funnel content this is where you typically find the tutorials a lot of technical writers um write where the call to action is sign up to use this feature sign up to create a database or sign up to create an account that's typically the call to action here the call to action on top of funel content is check out this tool or check out this group of tools that could help you consider these two sending you to the website this one sending you to create an account uh so we uh we go from these to some kinds of like what are the kinds of uh bottom of funnel content from customer case studies this should also be linked to like middle of funnel because customer case studies can be considered as um as yeah actually bottom of funnel content because they help you decide they're showing you proof of the success of that product so um release notes and product announcements FAQs basically content that just helps you pay that says okay now you're good pay some money um we went from that to you know looking at content optimization it's uh a lot of technical writers feel like you know once you write content cheers it's like peace till till whenever but yeah you could make the content better you could see that this content is doing so well that you have the opportunity to improve the call to action or improve the code maybe something has changed in the code uh that the content isn't really as useful so you need to update it so you need to keep an eye on that there's nothing more annoying than you arri on some content some documentation some tutorials and you try it and like oh no sorry that was like on the previous version and it's just like the code is not working or if it's something graphical like an application and you're like hey I go into like file and that menu and the option that you're talking to me about is not existing it's not there yeah exactly it's been deprecated but you know no one no one knows and for for that workflow it's it's uh it's a bit difficult for the reader at that time to just figure it out they just abandon the content and go to something else so content optimization knowing like when to uh optimize content which feeds into like content analysis everything that happens after you've created the content link shortners tracking tracking different like metrics what does conversion look like I I talked technical writers about UTM parameters they have absolutely no idea what those even even mean uh when when does content age right when do you look in Google analytics for instance and be like Oh seems like we're not getting as much traffic or look in Google search console for instance and be like okay we're ranking number one for these problems developers are searching for now we're not uh maybe we need to change the content in some way so uh that's something technical writers could uh care about and then there's the there's the last pit which is content distribution how do you distribute your content how do you make sure like the open graph data is really good the banner image is really captivating so someone wants to click click on it uh where do you put your content communities how do you post it on Reddit you don't want to go to Reddit and sell you don't want to post tutorials exactly you don't want to post tutorials on LinkedIn for instance right how do you include it in newsletters how do you collaborate with others to distribute your content right so these are some of the bits that what's a canonical link what does it even mean to put your content somewhere and cross poost it somewhere else right how does that affect um Google's perception and ranking of that content piece so these are things technical writers uh should consider and uh obviously when I wrote this I wrote this wasn't keep learning this was keep writing which is the last bit is you could do all these things but if you're still not writing or creating then uh you could be doing a whole lot better so this was keep writing but I guess the team wanted it to be I like to keep learning too I mean like I understand where you're coming from I understand sh go was like keep writing and it makes sense but I think keep learning is good too because like as as a technical writer you need to have a certain expertise about the topic you're writing about so you need to learn so I I think vot are good but are good yeah yeah true um so uh again this road map is supposed to make anyone a well-rounded technical writer any technical writer can pick one section and be like okay this is what I want to focus on I just want to write top of marketing content right but in the world we live in today you could get like replaced um just because someone else could do so much better but if you know all these you're well on the path to not just being a technical writer but being a technical content leader leading a team of technical writers eventually if that's something anyone is considering or just being a Kass IC like independent Creator uh on the team um so yeah that is um that's what we have today on uh on the road map I like that thank thanks for uh sharing that for free for people out that out there it's available on Ro m.sh I shared the link a couple of times when we're talking about it um it's it's it's what I usually tell people like there there's some of some people like oh I need to keep my expertise and I need to like like because like people's going to be able to compete and like come on it's nice it's like you're going to have competition it's good but like what you're doing is like you're sharing your expertise with other people and I feel like it's it's something we should all do like trying to to share that and just help other people being successful and you know what like there's some benefits to do that like there's a lot of benefits do that but like there's also a commercial benefit like someone watching the video likes stream right now or watching the recording because like they want to start to create more like written documentation within their company but it's not their full-time role and they look at that and like oh you know what maybe that was a little more complicated than I thought maybe we don't have like the time to hire someone maybe it's not a priority to right now but we still want to write uh orig content and like you know what why not hire William or hack member like like this is their expertise and they're all going to be able to do that and go through all those steps and they already have like the knowledge to create great content so yeah that'd be great that be I'm happy to help and a lot of times I just talk to people to you know advise them it keeps me sharp you know it keeps me also um because if you if you advise someone or you share like some information to them you don't have to be partners or work with them they don't have to pay you but if it works whatever you shared with them Works you've just validated an idea or hypothesis that you have and then you can go share that to like our partners and make more money from them so some way once you create value it always finds a way to just like pay itself back like come back in some way I totally agree with that it may not seems like that at the beginning uh and obviously prioritize especially at the beginning if you need money prioritize things that pay but like once you're in a sweet spot where likey you know what I make a living I'm okay I could make more I could have more customers but like how can also give back to the community uh I I think it's really important to do that um one of the thing that you know uh just going back to hiring also professional to do technical writing if you don't have a specific role within your company if you feel like it's overwhelming if you feel you're just not able to do it because uh writing is accessible for everyone doesn't mean that everyone does it well it's like any other things in the world we're not good at everything um I I was saying in my talk I mean mean like if all the tips that I shown you you're like yeah I don't think I'm going to do that like hire someone because uh I mean like that's worth all the money because you you may have the best software out there the best product out there if people don't know how to use it that wor you won't get users you won't get customers and usually it goes through like having like great text based documentation I'm a I'm a big believer of like video contents but I'm also a big believer like text based content and I think it's I think it's important for a business to have those yeah yeah I agree I think mix of both um they're very good again goes back to understanding who the consumer like who the reader is or who the end user um is if you understand the state they are in you would know if they prefer written content because they're developing they just want to copy the code and paste it in and have it work that's it or are they like beinging watching and thinking about like Gans or um thinking about AI tools and how deep Learning Works within the context of your to so they can just watch a YouTube video yeah they don't want to read an article for that so everything once you understand the state the consumer in the users in you could create matching content that's how I I see both working yeah I agree so um amazing thanks for sharing that I really appreciate that that was uh that was great hopefully it brings value to people listening to uh the show right now um on that note William um I think we talk about a lot of things I'm pretty sure we could still talk about a lot of things but I feel like we reach the end of the show it's it's about an hour that we're talking together uh I like you but I have other on my plan today um and again I tried to keep those show uh they're still long but I tried to keep them within about that time frame so um any last word last thing you want to share with folks we listening or watching the recording yeah I'd say I mean to anyone in De just uh keep creating whether whether you're a manager you're just starting out um creating some way find a way find the least the way to create with the least friction right it could be podcast like this it could be writing an article it could be writing threads but just keep creating because with developer relations from my experience that's how you actually stay like relevant that's how it's uh that's how you stay like ageless I would see yeah yeah my buddy disagree with the Ageless part but my career agree with that but my buddy does not right now but no great great advice I love that and uh last note on my side uh TKS to sponsor construct which is my employer so if you are in the Clown native space we have two amazing products for you go check Cube first or Colony Cube first is instant getups platform so if you're using kues you want to have that production ready cluster please please please uh give it a try it's open source uh happy to answer any question but again just saying thanks because um I'm able to do that live stream because of the fine folks that are my employers uh construct so thanks for for letting me do that live stream and uh thanks William for uh being a guest for being at the show taking your precious time to you know share your passion about like technical writing and also like all your tips about like how to do how to be a great technical writer uh really appreciate that that was a real a real pleasure to have you on sh yeah thanks thanks for this was a this is fantastic I really get on podcasts that I'm not the host so uh it's it's great for a change and this was fantastic thanks Fred wonderful my pleasure and thanks everybody who join us live uh thanks for the folks who watch the recording if you have any question about techn C writing uh you know you know how to reach out to William you can ask me question too I'm going to be more than happy to help you if I have the answer and on that note have a good rest of the day and see you for the next everal show in two weeks bye cheers, Devrelshow Episode 25 - William Imoh, Frédéric Harper, 01jagywb919t0xq1wnharpsjqh.