Technical Writing
Here's a selection of my technical writing projects. Some are personal projects and some were made for employers, but I'm proud of all of them. If you'd like to discuss what I can do for your company, organisation, or project, please reach out to me.
I.T. Networking course
howto.danieloaks.net/networkingSkills: Instructional design, creating diagrams.
Objectives
Understanding networks is vital in the tech industry. From customer service agents solving problems and QA technicians debugging issues, to programmers writing internet-facing software, knowing how devices communicate helps a lot.
I decided to create a free course that explains networking, from top to bottom. This course should let readers understand why common pain points for users happen and learn how to solve them.
Approach
When approaching a course like this one, understanding what should and should not be explained is important. The first step of this project was to work out which topics fell where. Research revealed that DNS, speed, and connectivity issues are common pain points for users and CS agents.
So those issues make up the core of the content. Switching and Routing were chosen as optional sections, as they provide a lot of context. Finally, NAT and security are useful-to-know, but often misunderstood topics, so these were chosen as extra-credit areas.
The subject matter expert on this course is myself. I've had a lot of networking experience in the past, including studying for both the Cisco CCNA and a diploma of I.T. Networking at TAFE. These studies, as well as research (looking at specifications and other source documents) informed the course content.
Creating the pages involved deciding the information to convey, then exploring how to best explain the facts. For example, the core content starts by explaining the history of packet-based communication, then moving on to the building blocks of the internet, and finally puts all that together in the 'debugging' pages. I designed a basic look for the diagrams in Adobe Illustrator, then kept the layouts and elements consistent throughout the course.
Results
The course has proven useful to customer service agents I've worked with, helping them more deeply understand and respond to customer issues.
Throughout the course's lifecycle, several industry professionals have also reviewed the course and provided feedback. From this, the NAT page was fairly extensively rewritten. It was also noted that the content is generally accurate, and would be useful to those learning about networking.
Overall, I'm fairly happy that the course has achieved what I set out to. It provides a good set of knowledge, and it's useful to all kinds of professionals.
The Sendle Developer Hub
I joined Sendle to help them overhaul their developer documentation. Using our existing docs as a base, I rewrote, updated, and expanded our docs to launch the Developer Hub. This gave self-service opportunities to external partners and ensured our engineering team could update docs on their own, much more easily than before.
developers.sendle.comSkills: Information design, content design, diagramming, OpenAPI, talking with SMEs, developer evangalism.
Sendle PrestaShop User Guide
While I was at Sendle we built our first official store plugin. We needed a guide telling store owners how to install and use it. I worked with the dev team and Sendle's other writers to put together this public-facing user guide.
Sendle PrestaShop Module User Guide.pdfSkills: Instructional design, how-to, help centre, software testing.
IRCv3 Working Group
I designed and implemented the current IRCv3 Working Group website. This included organising the information in the most presentable way, setting up the specification and web repos so that one seamlessly imports into the other, and creating consistent specification templates to be followed.
ircv3.net/Skills: Specifications, information design, Jekyll, Liquid templating.
Modern IRC Docs
I created the Modern IRC Client Protocol documents. This includes the primary protocol document, the formatting doc, and the CTCP Internet-Draft. These documents help implementers of the Internet Relay Chat protocol by describing real-world behaviour.
modern.ircdocs.horse/Skills: Specifications, consulting SMEs, community engagement, software testing.
Tweetcard Study Site
Pico-8 is a virtual console, and you can use Lua to program games and more for it. I created this site to explain how small visual effects work to the Pico-8 community.
demobasics.pixienop.net/tweetcarts/Skills: Instructional design, web development, programming.