Meet our new host Kate Mueller and get the inside scoop on how The Not-Boring Tech Writer (TNBTW) will work moving forward.
Kate Mueller is the Documentation Goddess of KnowledgeOwl, a seasoned technical writer and owner of knowledgewithsass, a knowledge management coaching service. She’s written and maintained documentation for companies in broadcasting, financial services, IT, and software for 15+ years. She’ll be hosting TNBTW moving forward.
In this episode, Kate discusses her vision for TNBTW: a podcast dedicated to everyone who is writing technical documentation, including those who may not feel comfortable calling themselves tech writers. Whether you create product documentation, support documentation, READMEs, or any other technical content—and whether you deal with imposter syndrome, lack formal training, or find yourself somewhere in the gray area between technical communications and general writing—the TNBTW reboot might be your new favorite podcast. Kate talks about her own imposter syndrome using the tech writer label and recounts her tech writer villain origin story.
We plan to release two episodes per month: one episode will maintain the traditional TNBTW format of interviewing a guest and focusing on useful skills or tools that can help you improve your tech writing skills; the other episode will be a behind-the-scenes look into what Kate’s working on, struggling with, or thinking about in her daily tech writing life.
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Transcript
Kate Mueller: [00:00:04] Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we explore topics and hear from other writers to help inspire us, deepen our skills, and foster our distinctly not-boring tech writing community.
In today's episode, we relaunch the podcast and introduce you to our new (and hopefully not-boring) host. Spoiler, I'm neither Jacob nor Jared. My name is Kate Mueller. Hi, nice to meet you. When KnowledgeOwl decided to relaunch The Not-Boring Tech Writer, they asked me to serve as the host and my first thought was immediate panic. Am I a real enough tech writer to host this show? I feel more like a 'Pinocchio' tech writer. What if everybody figures it out? I'm not formally trained in technical communication or technical writing, and I do have formal training in both writing, generally at an information management, but I've never been super confident or comfortable with the title of tech writer. I've been doing technical writing for at least the last 15 years. I started with documenting databases I designed and built for coworkers to give them instructions on how to use them. Then I moved into user guides for third party software my company used, and eventually ended up writing support documentation for the software companies I worked for. I've helped write app copy and microcopy in two software products. I've written release notes and product newsletters and 'Getting Started' guides, and I've taken thousands of screenshots. Working at KnowledgeOwl, I've brainstormed and advised customers on all kinds of things, including information architecture, content best practices, authoring and auditing processes, and getting buy-in and managing new knowledge base rollouts. I've created the first formal knowledge based places. I've migrated from one knowledge platform to another. I've trained people, I've mentored younger writers. I've spent the last 15 years taking complicated, highly technical tools and breaking them into easier to understand components. I've written documentation for technical and non-technical users and I've had to find ways to explain and simplify things that, 48 hours before, I'd never even heard of.
Kate Mueller: [00:02:26] These are all valuable technical writing skills, but I still kind of felt like an imposter offering to host a podcast about tech writing. I can't really say why I didn't feel technical enough to host this podcast. I guess, I don't write code, so there's that. I've never created a DOCSIS code pipeline from scratch. I'm not very good with using automating tools or anything that involves code, especially conditionals and loops, and I haven't been formally trained on it. I didn't go get a certificate or anything in technical communications. I just feel like I'm always aware of how much I don't know and all the deep expertise I don't have. I'm not a wizard with analytics, I've updated API docs, but I've never created them from scratch. I feel like I have a pretty good depth of knowledge, but a lot of my knowledge has grown only when I had some kind of immediate, urgent problem to solve, rather than in a methodical, systematic, or formal way.
Kate Mueller: [00:03:34] But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a lot of the writers I know feel this way. There's this slightly nagging feeling all the time, because I'm not an expert at literally the entire domain, I'm somehow not a real tech writer, and everybody else is. I've shied away from using the phrase 'tech writer' to describe what I do. Sometimes I've called it support documentation or product documentation. Sometimes I call myself a documentarian. I've also called myself a product champion. When I dug into other podcasts on tech writing, it felt like there were good podcasts for technical communication and good podcasts for general writing tips, but it didn't feel like there was anything fitting what I needed. Where's the podcast for those of us who don't feel like real tech writers, but who are, nonetheless, writing technical or support or product documentation on a regular basis? You're listening to the answer. That's what The Not-Boring Tech Writer is now, or at least that's what I hope it becomes. My focus in relaunching this podcast is on carving out a space for writers like me. If you feel like you write pretty good docs, but you dread when someone asks you to set up analytics, or you want to roll your eyes when marketing requests, SEO changes, or writing docs is just one of many hats you wear and you're worried you're not good enough at it. Or maybe you're secretly convinced you aren't qualified enough for your role. You found the right place, welcome home. We'll get to feel like mild imposters together. And together, we'll be exploring topics and hearing from guests to help inspire us, make us feel less alone, and teach us more about the skills and areas we don't feel as confident in.
Kate Mueller: [00:05:29] Here's what you can expect from The Not-Boring Tech Writer moving forward. I'm aiming for a two episodes per month schedule. One of those episodes will be, what I'm affectionately calling, the 'Kate Sounds Off' episodes, kind of like this one. You'll get to hear me talk about what's top of mind for me and my tech writing journey, what I'm working on, what I'm anxious about, whatever. My deepest, darkest tech writing secrets. Then the other...