Outside the Docs

The rest of me.

What I'm doing when the laptop's closed. A surprising amount of it has made me better at my actual job, though that was never really the plan.

Travel

Try finding your gate in a country where you don't speak a word of the language and you'll never take a good sign again for granted. Every trip teaches me something about design I didn't expect to learn.

Photography

Composition, light, and mostly just waiting around for the right moment. People don't expect it, but photography and technical writing have a lot in common — both come down to knowing what to leave out of the frame.

PC Building

I build the PC once to figure out what I'm doing, then again while actually taking notes. Turns out that's the only real way to write good instructions for anything.

Gaming

I've been gaming for years, and it's taught me more about onboarding than any UX course ever did. The good games never let you feel lost. The bad ones badly need someone like me on the team.

Snowboarding

Falling down a mountain over and over is a pretty good reminder of what it's like to be a first-time user with no idea what they're doing. Humbling, but in a useful way.

Hiking & Weightlifting

One clears my head, the other sharpens it. More documentation problems have solved themselves on a trail or between sets than I'd like to admit.