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Jenn Leaver
@
jennleaver
Bloomington, IL
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Leading Product Docs @GitHub.
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878
Tweetovi
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507
Pratim
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582
Osobe koje vas prate
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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8 h |
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Video calls only show your face and shoulders. Anything below that is fair game for winter coziness.
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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10 h |
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Working remotely is hard because my commute to the office doesn’t require “winter” clothes.
Which means I can’t get out of the car at school pick-up or all the parents will see my high-fashion look: capri leggings paired with dressy slip-on shoes that were by the door.
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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3. velj |
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Ha!! Thank you!! 😍😆
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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1. velj |
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Yeahhhhhh.... 😬😬😬 But everything that’s been done is built on the foundation you created. 💜 Literally wouldn’t have proper docs tooling without you!
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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1. velj |
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You can't have big dreams if you have no way to execute on them. I've got big dreams for docs at GitHub. And Zeke and Sarah have shown me that they're possible. It's been an incredible lesson to learn.
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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1. velj |
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If you're leading a docs team, push for dedicated engineering help. If you're an engineer or PM and you see that a docs team doesn't have dedicated help, push to get them that help. The work is complex and important.
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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1. velj |
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Without dedicated engineering, without Zeke and Sarah, we wouldn’t be where we are today. We’re set up for success. We feel confident. We know that our work is worthy of receiving help from other people. They gave our team hope.
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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1. velj |
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Their work inspired trust on our team. For the first time in my career, I knew there were engineers who deeply cared about this work. It’s such a simple thing - knowing that you have support, that you’re not alone - but it changes everything.
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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1. velj |
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More than anything though, having dedicated engineers on docs meant that for the first time ever, writers had engineers who intimately understood the needs of our team and spent their time thoughtfully working to make things better internally for writers and externally for users.
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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1. velj |
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Zeke, along with Sarah Schneider, a writer-turned-engineer, redid all our back-end tooling. Their work made the writer's work easier, enabled us to internationalize help.github.com, set the foundation for new initiatives, and gave us the first iteration of a new design.
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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1. velj |
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Back in late 2018, @zeke reached out to me - from a different team! - and mentioned that he wanted to help us with localization. It was the first time in my entire career that an engineer had ASKED to help. That conversation changed the entire docs experience at GitHub.
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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1. velj |
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Docs teams are often left to do all of this themselves. People think that the job of a tech writer is non-technical, but that’s not true. Tech writers are often engineering their own tooling solutions and sites with minimal or no help from anywhere in the organization.
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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1. velj |
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Writing docs is complex. You need tooling that can handle single-sourcing, versioning, variables, reusables, localization, the ability to pull in automated content generated elsewhere, etc. And all of this content needs to make it onto a site that has a great info experience.
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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1. velj |
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A couple years ago, the docs team at GitHub wasn’t in a great position. We’d outgrown our tooling, both in terms of the number of writers using it and the complexity we’d introduced with new products. We use GitHub for everything and have a “docs as code” philosophy.
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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1. velj |
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I was working on reviews this week and keep coming back to something: how important it is for docs teams to have dedicated engineering help. So here’s a story about the impact engineers have had on my team.
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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25. sij |
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This is the goal we’d like to reach in the near future. 😺
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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24. sij |
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Every time I see [sic] in a quote, I die of second-hand embarrassment. Can you imagine the shame of having your mistake passive aggressively pointed out FOR ALL TIME?
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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21. sij |
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Feel free to DM me! 😍
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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21. sij |
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I lead a team of tech writers! Happy to answer any questions you may have around tech writing as a career or the things I look for in candidates! Also - someone on our team has a very similar background to you - those skills are definitely transferable! 😍
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Jenn Leaver
@jennleaver
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18. sij |
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I’ll miss working with you so much, Catherine, but am happy for all the social media things that can help us keep in touch. 😍
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