Today, while hoping into this weekly writing circle, I said something funny while stating my intentions for the day.

It is now 15:00 in Lyon (I’ll update my now page soon, but I’ve been moving around a lot in the past month). I’m only staying here for a couple days and this is the only full day I have, however, I have a lot of work on my hands today and will be stuck in front of the computer for the whole day. It honestly kinda sucks that some days have to be like that, but knowing that most days aren’t, this is okay.

Most of the work I have to do today is writing, I now mostly write for work. Articles, documentations, publications, these are all technical writings I have to finish. I can’t help but think back at the time I decided to write for work. I started exploring a bit more than 2 years ago this in-between of tech and writing. I had no clue what it would look like really or if this was even feasible, yet, today I am stuck at home writing all day.

Entering the writing circle, I knew I had to write a bit more, but it felt silly.

“I’m gonna try to take a break from my writing by writing here about something else”.

Yeah, silly.

It’s good for me to reflect on what I need to take a break from.
Thinking about it, I believe Technical Writing is a practice of frustration.

The main frustration is the desire to hide any emotion or subjectivity within the resulting work. Technical Writing rewards getting out of the way of the reader. It is information heavy and as an engineer reading it, I don’t want feelings, just facts. I initially thought that as an engineer turned writer this would be second nature, and it kinda is, but now, stepping out of technical writing for a few hours to now write; it feels liberating.

Technical writing tests my limits on how much I cannot express myself, almost to the point of wondering if I still want to do this for days on end. This makes me think of a next step, what can I bring to technical writing and to this rigid environment to make it less painful on the writer. Does it only come down to what a reader wants?

When reading documentation, I don’t want to see the author through it. This is why I hide emotions.
When is it that I am reading something about technology that I want to see the author ?

I think the answer lies in building a relatable story. Tech companies have a hard time being relatable, especially to engineers, it’s only in hard moments that they can show their true self and that engineers build a bond to them.

I’m thinking back of a Github Outage back in 2015 or so, I remember Github Engineers opening a live zoom call, debugging and sharing their process while they were extinguishing the fire(s). This was seen as amazing, the community even though they were directly impacted by the incident, supported them and showed love for the way they chose to share their process. It was raw, unedited and full of emotions.

What happened then was better than any overly-edited and AI-checked PR piece that is meant to build rapport. Rapport was built by humans watching other humans do work.

This brings me back to the type of writing that would make me more excited. Can we write with emotions in the tech space ?

I’m wondering if that’s why the whole buildinpublic movement is so successful, these devs don’t have PR teams monitoring every words coming out for their product, and people love to follow them for it. They seem accessible and relatable. I wonder how we can build this level of developer relationship to more standard company. Would any company be willing to share some emotions or would that irk the shareholders too much to risk it?