I enjoy working as a technical writer. It’s satisfying to translate technical concepts and language into everyday language. I like that my work has a direct impact on how customers experience software. I value the deep working relationships I get to build with SMEs and other technical writers. It’s work that suits me well.

And also.

I come from a humanities background: I earned two bachelor of arts degrees (one in Communication Studies and one in Spanish), then later went to library school. My first professional love, knowledge management, is about connecting people, process, and technology—but it’s not a tech-driven field. So when I moved into the technical writing space, hard technical skills were not the primary reason I was hired on. I was not extremely familiar with APIs. I had never heard of webhooks. I sort of knew what an SDK was, but not really.

What I did have was a surplus of curiosity, good explanation skills, an understanding of how to write procedurally for an audience, and the confidence to ask even the seemingly basic questions—ones that I knew our users would also have.

I’ve now worked as a proper technical writer for 3 years. In that time, I’ve improved significantly in my technical deficits. I’m now at the point where I know (more about) what I don’t know, and I want to deepen my knowledge further so that I can expand the types of work I do.

That brings me to the subject of this post: my learning goals for 2025.

1. Create a personal site in Hugo

I’ve mostly worked in CCMS or CMS environments to date. I’ve heard a lot about docs-as-code and static site generation. So, this year I’d like to try my hand at spinning up my own site with Github Pages and Hugo. Tooling specifics may change once I get further into this, but that’s the plan so far. Because these skills are very new for me, I expect this will take a while. I’m excited to give it a go.

Skills I’m hoping to gain:

• Practical experience with authoring in a pseudo docs-as-code flow
• Trying out a static site generator!
• More CSS/stylesheet exposure

2. Practice OpenAPI documentation

I’ve done a bit of API documentation at my day job, and it’s been an enjoyable challenge. I’d like to continue learning independently by documenting a few example endpoints following OpenAPI specs.

Skills I’m hoping to gain:

• Experience using Swagger and documenting for OpenAPI

3. Brush up on search & retrieval possibilities…

…especially as they relate to LLMs and genAI.

At 2024’s Write the Docs Atlantic conference, I attended a talk on retrieval augmented generation (RAG). The presenter, Manny Silva, gave a great overview of how doc content relates to RAG. (It’s helpfully summarized below in these conference sketchnotes by Dennis Dawson.)

In 2025, I’d like to delve deeper into these concepts. This is an “I don’t know what I don’t know” area for me, so I can’t say what skills I’m expecting to gain. But, I find that knowledge is often its own reward.

Looking behind

It’s been some time since I last wrote about what I’m up to—and what I’ve learned!—so you can expect another post with a write-up in the near future. Perhaps 2025 will be the year I consistently contribute to my blog…?

I’m also planning to update my portfolio soon, as I’ve gotten a lot of fresh writing under my belt in the last year. Stay tuned. 🙂