Dana Scheider

Biography

Dana Scheider is a software engineer at Envato. Hailing from Portland, Oregon, she currently lives in Melbourne, Australia. Dana is also on the Cucumber core team. She is particularly interested in testing, behaviour-driven development, REST API design, technical writing, diversity and inclusion, and improving processes within engineering organisations. Dana’s extracurricular interests include mathematics, opera, foreign languages and Star Trek. An in-demand speaker, notable conference appearances include SwanseaCon, CukeUp! London, Full Stack Toronto, RubyConf Colombia, and Covalence Conf.

Talk description

Technical writing is rarely taught in code schools or listed among the qualifications for an engineering job. Yet developers rely heavily on documentation to use the tools they need to use. Not only that, decisions about which tool to use often take into account the availability of quality documentation. It’s important not to leave the task of writing docs to technical writers who may not fully understand the underlying technology or use cases. This talk will teach you the basics of technical writing–from tutorials and API reference guides to pull requests, release notes, and even code comments - so you can increase adoption of your software and keep the developers using it happy.