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From tech writing to building lovable neighborhoods with Jacob Moses · The Not-Boring Tech Writer

• Kate Mueller: [00:00:04] Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we hear from other writers to explore writing concepts and strategies, deepen our tech writing skills, get inspired, and connect with our distinctly not-boring tech writing community. If you are passionate about documentation, you belong here, no matter your job title or experience level. Welcome. [00:00:31] Hello my lovely, not-boring tech writers. Today I'm so excited to welcome to the pod a writer who doesn't really need an introduction since he was the founder and host of The Not-Boring Tech Writer from March 2016 until the end of 2020, or the beginning of 2021. I'm delighted to welcome back the very not-boring Jacob Moses. Jacob, welcome. Jacob Moses: [00:00:57] Hi, Kate. Thank you. So happy to be here. Kate Mueller: [00:01:00] It's a full-circle moment for me because I was a guest on the podcast when you hosted. Here we are doing a full, not-boring inception moment where I get to interview you instead. So for folks who maybe haven't dug into the back seasons and the older episodes, can you tell us a little bit about your tech writer villain origin story? How did you get into tech writing in the first place? Jacob Moses: [00:01:26] Absolutely. So it goes back to whenever I was in community college. I had just moved up to Denton, Texas, beautiful college town just north of Dallas. And I always wanted to be a writer, but didn't really know in what exact space yet. I was just doing my prerequisites at the time at a local community college, picking up at this coffee house called Jupiter House, dabbling around wearing an oversize hipster beanie at the time. I heard this conversation behind me; this gentleman was with what I later learned was a client, talking about some tech writing gig work, freelance work. And I was like, "This sounds interesting," talking about some interesting writing there, talking about some actual payment for this gentleman as well. And then the client leaves, and the writer sticks around. I just turn around in my little swivel chair and say, "Hey, my man, what is it that you're up to? You're doing some writing work. This seems really cool". He said, "Jacob, I got you. I don't know you, but I got you. This is what you need to do. You gotta holler at Brenda Simms. She's the chair at the University of North Texas Technical Communication department". I didn't know where I was going to go to finish my degree at the time. He said “Go to UNT, right down the block.” At the time it was one of the only universities in the United States where you actually could get a bachelor's degree in techcom or tech writing. He said, "These are the classes you need to take. Holler at these professors. It's a good life. Make it happen." So I think I was a freshman. Kate Mueller: [00:02:47] So it was just a chance meeting at a coffee shop? Oh, I love this so much. Jacob Moses: [00:02:51] And it's so funny. Flash forward many years, maybe more than ten. I ran into him at a pottery class in Dallas. We were one of five people in this random pottery class. I hadn't seen him since. His name is John. It's crazy. I thanked him, I thanked him for everything. I ended up studying techcom at UNT. It was an absolute gift. Took classes on grants proposals, high tech manuals, procedures, branding, web design, all the goodies. Then thereafter graduated in 2015. My first gig was as a tech writer at Rainmaker Digital, formerly known as Copyblogger Media. They had a CMS called the Rainmaker Platform that was doing end-user documentation. I interned for a little bit there, and during that time picked up on how people feel about tech writers, or at least at the time, just assuming that we're boring and not really doing interesting work. And I was like, forget y'all. I'm gonna name a podcast called the exact opposite, called The Not-Boring Tech Writer. And yeah, just brought on a bunch of homies, people that I admired, Tom Johnson, peers here to celebrate tech writers, no matter where they're at in their careers or interests. And the rest is history. So considering all my options, I was looking at Boulder, a place that's amazing, it has so many great amenities. They're already doing their thing. So I could stay there, of course, benefit from all of my predecessors work or consider returning back to Denton and being a major contributor in building these prosperous neighborhoods. So I chose to move back and eventually resigned from Rainmaker and opened up in downtown Denton, with what I called The Boutique Bodega. So you can think about a corner store like space in terms of its footprint, but carrying premium grocery products. So that was called Blue Bag Market. The premise of the name was it's in the middle of your neighborhood. You should just get enough to fill up one blue bag. We sold custom blue totes and then came back the next day. So trying to encourage people to live on a neighborhood level, supporting the homies on the block. So I did Blue Bag for a bit. I was 23 at the time. My due diligence in real estate was lacking. So we were solving ish. But it was tough being an owner operator seven days a week. But shout out KnowledgeOwl. Our internal procedures were hosted with KnowledgeOwl. As always, we're always trying to show love to tech writing folk, even though I was the only one who read the procedures because I was an owner operator and I had no employees. I said, I need to have documentation regardless. I need to write this down. Kate Mueller: [05:48] One of the things that's astounded me hosting now is how truly not-boring most tech writers are. We have really diverse interests, often really wild hobbies, all kinds of really fun stuff. Jacob Moses: [06:02] Absolutely. And I like the advocacy that's baked into tech writers as well, where, like you said, we are all passionate and on the advocacy side, which is so important these days, to be able to do it through the written word is so compelling, to go to the source material and have your theory be based on sources. It's just lovely. All love for tech writers. Kate Mueller: [06:24] I often think that my tech writer villain origin story is partially because I have a terrible memory. And so through most of my working adult life, and even when I was a student, I would create self-documentation cheat sheets on how to do stuff, especially for work things that I only did once a month or once a quarter. And that for me is, I believe, was the first technical documentation I did. I can totally see being an owner operator of one, creating documentation for yourself to be able to like, "Oh, let's make sure I do this thing the same way, or the fastest way or the easiest way", or "I just don't have to retrain myself on how to use this thing that I never use". Jacob Moses: [07:09] Absolutely. I think about that even in terms of more objective documentation, like manuals and procedures, but it also subjectively, like it's nice to know what you believe in as a person, so whenever you have a passing thought to write it down and to be able to reflect on it and have it inform stuff you do henceforth; all of that introspection and reflection of the written word is really lovely. Kate Mueller: [07:32] Yeah, 100%. I did a solo episode recently talking about self-documentation as a form of reflection, and sometimes that interrogation of yourself to try to force yourself to just actually articulate some of those things can be so meaningful. Jacob Moses: [07:52] Absolutely. Kate Mueller: [07:52] You were 23 as a solo owner-operator working seven days a week. Sounds like you got to a point where you were like, "Oh, this is not really working for me." So tell me a little bit more about what you did after that. Jacob Moses: [08:06] Yeah. So during that time, I was also looking for ways to serve my neighbors. I found a local organization called the Denton Affordable Housing Corporation. They're a nonprofit doing affordable housing development in Denton, and they've been at it since 1995. I hollered at them and I was asked to join their board as I was fading out of Blue Bag. I did end up getting a gig at an international media organization called Strong Towns doing community building, which was nice because I was getting some affordable housing experience on the advocacy side at the Denton Affordable Housing Corporation, or DAHC for short, so I don’t have to say that long name again. And then also, at a more national level, I was consulting neighborhood groups across the country and how to advocate for their neighborhoods. So that was a hoot. I podcasted there as well, I ran a podcast called It's the Little Things, highlighting citizen advocates and how they're making their place stronger. And eventually left Strong Towns as well, as I was so generously offered the Executive Director position at DAHC. June 2020, middle of the Covid pandemic and in the middle of which we so supported the CARES act with eviction moratoriums, which was essential for public health interventions but also tricky on the property owners’ side in terms of cash flow and keeping homies paid on the personnel side and such. I was 27 at the time, and didn't have any concrete real estate development experience, but just a hardcore advocate for the homies and blocks, no matter your income. So I was the ED at DAHC through, golly, May of 2025, and then went to start my own real estate development company. I'm still within the ethos of community development. So today between myself and my brother, we're partners in an organization called Care Block Development, through which we primarily specialize in doing historic rehabs. These are buildings that we own, and actually I formerly was a tenant in whenever I was a student at UNT. Kate Mueller: [10:09] That's a nice full-circle moment, also. Jacob Moses: [10:11] Yeah, it's a hoot. And I've always been so tight with these local property owners who are aging and are looking to offload their assets, and they all just started calling me up and saying, "Hey Jacob, we appreciate the work you're doing, historic rehabs. You believe in neighborliness." So we've been at that for a bit now. My brother and I have a ton of fun doing realty lending, acquisition, development, GC work, all the goodies, but really if you look at our website, careblockdevelopment.com, we strive for building lovable places. That's the phrase that we use because we do believe in reciprocity, and we believe that if you build a lovable place, that it'll be loved in return by whomever you might be leasing the home to and leaning on three tenants. We believe that every home is a neighborhood, that it is a place to commune, to party, to gather, to support, to love. We believe in blurring public and private life in terms of really creating really interesting street life. I do believe that we progress towards aiding America's ills through repetition, proximity, and accountability. And I do believe that happens in the commons/public spaces. And then lastly, and I think later on is a question about what a piece of advice I have is, I'm going to tease it now. Our last tenant I actually stole from Eric Holscher, the founder of Write the Docs in following the Pac-Man rule, which has absolutely changed my life. I have goosebumps. I might cry. But this is part of the onboarding documentation for attendees at the Write the Docs conference, in that you walk into the conference hall and to be very acutely aware as an attendee, to not form just the tight circle. There's no room for another homie to come kick it, but to always leave room. Follow the Pac-Man rule. Kate Mueller: [12:01] Yeah. So you leave space for somebody else to join so that people, especially newcomers who don't know anybody else there, can easily walk up and join a group without having to feel like you're asking other people to move or displace themselves or interrupt the conversation. It is such a small thing, but it is so huge in changing the way that that conference experience goes. Jacob Moses: [12:28] Always leave room for another homie. Absolutely. It's colossal. And so we've literally translated that to all of our development work as well. We're acutely aware of the role that real estate developers play in gentrification in particular, and we do not stray from those conversations. But we also believe in incremental progress. We believe that places that struggle should not just continue to struggle, because we choose to just have blanket pushback on any kind of redevelopment. Part of the Pac-Man rule is bringing everyone else up with us through the ways in which we host block parties, working with women- and minority-owned businesses, but also being still acutely aware of not being a philanthropic tilt, but actually trying to have legitimate systemic change at the block level. So that's what we're up to now. It's a blast. I'm just so, so grateful for my brother, all my homies, our tenants. We're throwing a tapas event next Saturday. One of our tenants is from Seville, Spain. Their first time in the United States is in Denton, Texas. They're doing the Fulbright program at UNT, but we partnered with them to do tapas events. They're getting paid. They're pushing tapas. So we're having the best time. And there's tech writing scattered throughout all this work, which we can talk about if you'd like. But we're still very much in the tech writing game. Kate Mueller: [13:51] Yes, yes. Although before we get into that, there's one thing I just want to pull back to something you said much earlier here, was the idea of lovability because it's weirdly connecting to something else I've been thinking about a lot lately. I read this blog post recently that was trying to redefine the concept of minimum viable product, and they suggest breaking it into three separate concepts or steps: earliest testable, earliest usable, and earliest lovable. That's a thing I've been thinking about in how to apply for me within the documentation world. Strung throughout so much of our discourse is the idea of something just being consumed or being used, and we often sidestep the idea of it being lovable and of people connecting with it in some deep way. For me, that's so much easier to conceptualize if you're talking about living spaces or community. But I think it should be something that we're also talking about with the software that we build or the documentation that we write or the services that we provide people, right? We're all humans trying to connect to other humans, and boy, shouldn't lovability be part of that thing? Jacob Moses: [15:17] Oh, my mind goes a million directions on that, Kate. In terms of lovability and different types of products and services, I'll first harken back to my time at Blue Bag, an area in which we struggled was that we didn't have any ready made product. So everything you could literally shop around. I see your dark chocolate and sea salt Kind bar. I see how much it costs. I can shop around at Family Dollar, Walmart, all the other retailers to measure value as a consumer, which of course is fantastic. We want to be price-conscious on so many levels, but you can't necessarily measure lovability. Lovability is subjective, the value is subjective. And if you can harness that for good, you can make a legitimate impact in people's lives. So like you said, in terms of how we document products and services, how we actually design it itself using design thinking and to maximize the lovability side to also to make you a more solvent organization. I mean, I think about my time at Strong Towns. Most of our work was talking about municipal finance, and we think about city services and just maybe thinking that it's okay for cities to operate at a loss in perpetuity if it's for the good of the block, which is a fair thought. But eventually, if your liabilities are in excess of your assets, you may have to eventually cut off neighborhoods, which is a very scary thought. And they're going to be low-income, minority neighborhoods. So I remember the director, Charles Marohn, would always say, no matter how noble your product or service is, whether you're an orphanage or whatever, you always have to be solvent, like your work exists because of your solvency. So if the top line for solvency is lovability and it's actually having a benefit at the user level, that's a really great intervention to the silliness of capitalism today, perhaps. Kate Mueller: [17:12] Yeah. We had some discussions around this at KnowledgeOwl the last couple of years because we hadn't raised our prices in quite a long time. And with inflation and other things, we were at the point where we were like, “You know what? We really need to do this.” And so we were having conversations about, well, how much do we raise, what seems reasonable for our customers? A big part of that conversation was us also saying, but what feels reasonable for us because we haven't raised prices for like 7 or 8 years. During that time, there's been a global pandemic, there's been significant inflation. We've been trying to hold this stuff steady because we care a lot about our customers, and we don't want them to have to pay more money, but also we need money to live on. We need money to keep the company solvent. And there is something to be said for recognizing that for all of those pieces to come together, you do need to focus on the finance piece a bit, because you can provide much more to the folks that you care about or who you're serving if you aren't just scraping by, but doing well. But having the goal not be, oh, we just want to make a lot of profit, to make a lot of profit, but we want to make profit so that we can plow more back into the product or hire somebody to handle this thing that we've always wanted to do, but we've never been able to do because we didn't have the budget for it. Kate Mueller: [18:45] Or in our case, we donate. We're part of 1% for people and planet, so we donate to a bunch of environmental organizations. Every month, one of the owls nominates an organization in their community, and we donate a portion to that. And all of those things, branching out into the community, trying to help other organizations, those things are only possible if we're solvent enough to do it. So there is that question of in order to provide the service that you want to provide and the way you want to provide it, you kind of need to make enough money to stay alive, to keep that organization going, to be able to feed into those places. And so it's not like profit for the sake of profit, but it's profit for a purpose. In order to achieve the purpose we want, we need to bring in enough money to do this. How do we do that in a way that feels authentic and not exploitative? Jacob Moses: [19:42] Absolutely. And if from the users’ perspective, if the lovability is the value that they get from it and it's legitimate lovability that comes from a good place, that's a fair value proposition. It can be iterative, which is the best part. Just-in-time documentation. Let's go back and forth. What are you messing with? What is lovability to you? We're not going to make any assumptions. Should I bring [Bri] Hillmer in for just-in-time documentation? Kate Mueller: [20:05] Yeah. And sometimes the things that people love are not the things that you expected that they would love. There are, in our case in the software world, there are features in the product that we maybe didn't put a lot of effort into. Someone requested this, we built it at some point, we did it in a fairly “let's throw something together and see if this meets their needs and we'll come back and build it out more later.” And then we never came back and built it out more. Story of every software company everywhere. But some of those features become beloved by certain authors who are like, "I use this in these ways, and it's helped meet these needs." And if you're not having those conversations about what makes something lovable to you, you may be missing opportunities where it's like one little change in how we do this. Let's just optimize this one thing that we have that we haven't given a lot of love to for a while. Let's give it a little bit of love. Let's update the user design or whatever. And suddenly this thing that was maybe a little back burner, side thought five years ago becomes a central feature that people adore and want to tell other people about and do stuff. Has it been a similar thing for you in the community development space, where there have been some things that you were surprised ended up getting the leverage or attention that they got? Jacob Moses: [21:33] I was surprised to have some theories that proved to be true, at least at the property level, at some of our properties. My overall premise on urban design and public investment is that humans really don't need that much to have a good time. You don't have to put every public art project through a public arts commission to be ridiculed and criticized, and to check every box on development codes that eventually just faces a five-lane highway or a Wendy's. But there's little things you could do, observing where people already struggle or where they're already having a good time and just do small interventions to help them have just a better hang. So the main way that Care Block thinks through that on the design side is: it’s unconditioned spaces. It’s front and back porches. And my theory was that they can be platforms for self-expression. Going back to what I think is the premise of societal change–proximity, repetition, and accountability–creating places, especially in the commons in which people feel like they can express themselves. So I remember one of our first events, we partnered with a group that I'm actually looking at here from our office. My homies Syd and Gannon, shout out if you're listening at the The Steady Hands Artist Cooperative. So these are all former art students at UNT who graduated and were trying to untrain themselves and support their fellow artists. How they display art doesn't have to be through traditional channels. It doesn't have to be a high barrier to entry. And then so their mission is to have low to no cost opportunities to showcase your art. Jacob Moses: [23:06] We partnered with them for a block party. And we have this beautiful 1907 craftsman in downtown Denton. Wraparound porch. And we used one of the porches to host an art and music festival. Didn't pull any permits. We do permits for the important stuff. We don't do permits for the really important stuff like block parties and hangs. The premise was this is in the middle of a residential neighborhood. If you look at the zoning code, the city doesn't want you to actually have a good time because it only allows single family homes. It doesn't allow any kind of commerce and third places and community building. So we just said we're gonna do it anyway. And we had several hundred attendees. It was a free event. People rolled up. We partnered with local musicians, local artists. They were making money. They were showcasing their work. We were pushing my homeboy David’s Cueva Nueva. It's a Spanish rojo from outside of Spain, just getting rowdy. But a long winded way to say that I've recognized through the development side of our work that people don't need much to have a good hang, to enjoy each other's company, meaning that we have more resources to allocate that on Care Block’s goal: every corner and every neighborhood in Denton and in this country. Thinking back to solvency and risk management and financial management, people are ready to have a good time. We don't have to really rack our brains on how to do it. Let's just observe our people's struggle, build community around it, and have a good hang. Kate Mueller: [24:30] Yeah, sometimes you don't need to overthink the solution. Sometimes you don't even need to provide a solution. You just need to provide a space. Jacob Moses: [24:40] Yeah, I'm going to go back. I think you want me to talk about tech writing and get less macro stuff. Let me talk about how this actually translates to our documentation work. Kate Mueller: [24:51] Please. Jacob Moses: [24:51] So, at Care Block, part of our work is building and acquiring properties for lease. So we lease to folk in the neighborhood. And then of course just my tech writing mind is like “Let's have a good time onboarding.” So one of more recent examples, we bought a five-unit building in my neighborhood built in 1886, one of which I lived in, and the previous owner had owned it for, I think, forty-some years and just had lore in Denton. Like if you're in Denton, you've known someone that's lived in this building, you've lived in it yourself. So of course, if there's any change in ownership, there's some understandable uncertainty about what's next. Are they going to crank up the rents? Are they going to not bring me new air filters, like, what's about to go down? And so we created these little laminated cards that gave a really interesting story on Care Block owners being passed residents, QR code to go to a full page on learning more about what Care Block does. Jacob Moses: [25:50] And then this is common in Denton. It's probably common in other places of just having property owners that don't maintain properties, they ignore work orders. So the first thing we did, we had a second laminated card with a QR code where they could scan it to submit their work orders. Just a nice little gesture of, if stuff is going wrong, we want you to have a lovable place. We'll come fix it. And thinking about the user experience and being empathetic to different ways in which people want to communicate, especially the tenant to landlord relationship. We also made it clear in onboarding documentation that you can also text me personally. You can call me personally, you can email me. But there's also people who, and I love them equally, don't actually want to correspond verbally or in the written word with their landlord. So we had a software where instead they could just fill out a form for their work orders, for which we'd be notified. So that was a hoot. It also came with a self-help guide on if anything's catastrophic, how to respond immediately, identifying fire extinguishers on site and how to use them, and gifted everyone a water meter key to shut off the water if there's a leak. Jacob Moses: [26:58] All things we would do immediately. I mean, we're block kids, I would pass this home every day and kick with my tenants. But say I'm elsewhere for some reason. Ways in which they can also look out for their own belongings. So again, just harkening back to Bri [Hillmer]'s work, according to the just-in-time documentation approach, back in her Survey Gizmo days and just wanting to create really tight feedback loops. This is also some more Bri shout-outs. I don't remember the episode number. It was definitely one of the first few, but she advocated for help documentation to have a little feedback mechanism where you could say this was helpful, this was unhelpful, and then using that to iterate and gradually improve upon your help documentation. So we definitely translate that to our real estate work as well, getting guidance on any aesthetic and cosmetic improvements to make sure people are interested in the work and that it represents their lifestyle, their ideologies and stuff. So that's a blast. I love doing that work. Kate Mueller: [27:59] I also really love that it's predicated on acknowledging that different people have different ways of wanting to engage or not engage or self-help or not self-help. And so, there's multiple paths to potential engagement there, right? You have the folks who might want to submit a work order, might want to text or call you personally or shoot you an email, but you also might have folks who just want to self-serve as much as they can. And so that documentation that helps them shut off the water if they're suddenly having a leak, that is empowering to people who do not want to have a high level engagement until they're required to have a high level of engagement. Jacob Moses: [28:43] Absolutely. Kate Mueller: [28:44] But there's also the flip side of that, that there's an advantage to you for people being empowered to do that as a property owner, because if it takes you four hours to be able to go turn off the water main if they've got a leak, now you're dealing with potential water damage. Whereas if they were able to self-serve and turn it off within the first 15 minutes of noticing it, you don't have a massive issue there. They have a better experience because they were able to stop it and potentially reach out. You have a better experience because when you find out about it, it hasn't blown into some catastrophic, expensive thing. And most of that is enabled just by recognizing that people have different levels of comfort with engaging, levels of comfort with self-serving, and that different paths would be appropriate there. Jacob Moses: [29:30] Yeah, we love it. And then concurrently, the whole time, we're constantly Pac-Manning. I guess Pac-Man can be a noun in the first example. Now I'm going to make a gerund, a verb gerund. Kate Mueller: [29:40] Go for it. Jacob Moses: [29:40] We're always Pac-Manning. Because we do host a lot of events, a lot of block parties, and a lot of ways in which people can interact with Care Block further, because we do have an economic development component, partnering with local small businesses to give them some exposure at our events. On the realty and lending side, we're deep in some of these FHA government products, which have very low down payment requirements. And because we also do construction, there's ways to consider a backyard apartment or little shut off doorways where you can actually subsidize your mortgage and underwriters count it towards income. As we think about how we can actually house the lower to middle class, we're very privy to all that work. But if someone just wants to do self-service forever, to love them equally. It's the best part in all this work to know that you're celebrated and beloved by Care Block, regardless of how much you choose to interact with some of our tertiary services. Kate Mueller: [30:40] Yeah, regardless of your level of engagement there. Jacob Moses: [30:44] Absolutely. Kate Mueller: [30:45] Which if I can extend that into the software world, the folks that you hear from the most are usually the people talking to your customer support or your customer success folks or their account executives or whomever. But there's also often this huge swath of your end-users who you never hear from, who might be totally thrilled about using your product, but they're not the kind of person who's going to reach out with that little feedback option and be like, "Hey, I love you guys!". Instead, they're just going to be quietly plugging away doing the thing, and you should appreciate them and create stuff for them just as much as the folks who are being the squeaky wheel about the always telling you, "Oh, I've got this idea," or "I really want this," or "I notice this thing's a little weird.” You are trying to serve the whole community there. Jacob Moses: [31:33] Absolutely. Thinking more so about documentation and being transparent and helpful to our users, we recently rolled out our general contracting (GC) line of business as well, where we're taking on clients to do historic rehabs. And I didn't have experience on the GC side. I was mostly a developer role at DAHC, but not actually putting together estimates and quotes and giving subs and such. I remember the first few jobs. It was an interesting problem to think through. How do I go about this? Do I use a spreadsheet? Do I need to consider some softwares? I have to adopt a bit of cultural humility because a lot of our subs are native Spanish speakers or English as a second language. It's just this really interesting conundrum to think about. How can I make sure everyone feels heard and marketed accordingly as it relates to the product and service that Care Block offers? And we eventually ended up getting a software called Job Tread, which has been a ton of fun. There's Gantt charts. I haven't really messed with Gantt charts much, but that's been a really fun experience. And again, just the self-service, even on the subcontractor side where we upload all of our selection of materials our clients want. So instead of a sub calling me saying, what kind of tile does the homie Abdin want? It's already uploaded. Jacob Moses: [32:53] They have a unique login that just happens through a mobile app. There's no fumbling with logins and such. And then even on the client side, I see my boy Raef walking. What's up Raef? I love this neighborhood. On the client side, and I remember the account executive at Job Tread was like, "Why would you want to do that?". How we do our estimates is that we give our client a unique link to actually watch me in real time, populate estimates, and I'm getting quotes from subs and they're like, “That's not how this works. You're not supposed to show the actual process.” But I'm like, I want to demonstrate progress. I don't want a client to be like, “What's homeboy Jacob been up to you for two weeks? I know this is a big job, but this feels a little excessive.” I want them to see that I'm working on the task at hand, and it's been beneficial to us. I've been going back to lovability. Lovability is immeasurable when you feel it. Let's design around that to help a client feel like they're being loved and cared for, hence the name Care Block. So yeah, we have fun. Kate Mueller: [34:00] A lot of that feels like you're centering humans, that a lot of those decisions are made centering the fact that they are decisions that impact other humans, rather than centering like, let's do the most efficient process here or whatever. That it is recognizing that those processes are impacting other people's lives. And to the extent that you have empathy as a human being, you're trying to center, “Okay, what would I want from this experience if I were the person on the receiving end of this? I would want to understand where things were at. I would like to understand a little bit about how that process works. Do I need every detail ever imaginable? Probably not.” But you can treat folks with respect, respecting their shared humanity, their shared interest in what's happening with places that I might live or that I am living, and recognizing that that's a thing that causes a great deal of potential stress, potential resistance, but also potential excitement, and then building processes that center humans, but also achieve your goal of actually moving forward with whatever the project is. Jacob Moses: [35:12] Absolutely. And then think about how that self-service on the estimating side translates to how I deploy my finite resources. I'm getting less calls from the client inquiring about how the estimating is coming along, less inquiry. We're very clear about our process. We do cost plus in all of our agreements. There's all this transparency up front, and we take them on the hero's journey throughout to ultimately the end product of having a rehabbed or newly constructed home, and they feel privy to the process. P2P. Goofy. So goofy. But yeah, we like it. And it's so counterintuitive for people in my space, but we love blowing up and reconstructing systems that we don't think are serving people. And it's been overall very beneficial. Kate Mueller: [35:58] So often it feels like we end up being at the mercy of the system, instead of recognizing that the system has been designed and implemented by people and therefore could be redesigned and implemented differently. Jacob Moses: [36:10] Yeah. The design thinking that's a throwback, The Not-Boring Tech Writer episode as well with Chris Lam, perhaps. Getting the user involved from the start. And what actually informs your product or service, especially on the software side. What are kids feeling? Make assumptions. Challenge those assumptions, then iterate thereafter. Kate Mueller: [36:31] By the way, all of these callbacks to earlier episodes, we will definitely link to them in the show notes. So if you want to use this as an entry point into some of those older episodes, please do. We'll link it and we'll help you get there. Kate Mueller: [36:45] And this might be a good spot for us to take a break. So we're going to take a quick break and we will be right back. Kate Mueller: [36:52] This episode is sponsored by KnowledgeOwl, your team's next knowledge base solution. You don't have to be a technical wizard to use KnowledgeOwl. Our intuitive, robust features empower teammates of all feathers to spend more time on content and less time on administration. Learn more and sign up for a free 30-day trial at knowledgeowl.com. Kate Mueller: [37:15] And we are back! So, Jacob, I think it's really awesome that you are still creating technical documentation in a sphere that is not necessarily a technical writing sphere, but I also feel like something we're dancing around a little bit here, which is that there are some skills that we cultivate as tech writers that can be applied a whole bunch of places that aren't necessarily documentation. And since you went to school for technical communication and you have worked as a technical writer, but you're now doing very different things, I feel like you are the perfect person for me to ask this of. Are there skills that have translated for you outside of technical communication into other things that you're doing? Jacob Moses: [38:02] Yeah, absolutely. The first one that comes to mind, I'll harken back to my time at Strong Towns, where we were supporting neighborhood groups in terms of how to advocate for their own place, but also supporting city officials, staff, and council members on how they can also serve their constituents. So when the public investment side and the municipal operation side, sadly what happens is you have your council members, your city staff, your mayor go to a big municipality conference here to be told, “Okay, this is what you need to do to run a city. This is development code that you need to implement. These are ordinances you need to adopt.” And then straight up and I empathize with it because running the city is very challenging. But what literally happens is a lot of copy and pasting from maybe some ordinances or some zoning codes that you're told you should consider without actually stress testing those in your actual city. Thinking about my time at Strong Towns, a major skill that I learned through tech writing, of course, was to be deeply involved with the user, to be deeply involved with anyone who supports you in creating that user documentation, whether it's customer support, developers, or salespeople, if your documentation is part of sales collateral, all the goodies. So I understood that very deeply. And then also again, shout out to the homie Bri and Marybeth and yourself and all the homies, understanding that first intervention, that first means by which you choose to support your people doesn't have to be perfect. You can test the theory and iterate thereafter. So on the public investment side where I learned about Strong Towns, which has been very beneficial to all people that were supported as following three rules for public investment, they go as such: humbly observe where people struggle, do the next small thing to address that struggle, and repeat. Kate Mueller: [40:12] Oh, I love this. Jacob Moses: [40:13] It doesn't have to be top down, doesn't have to be all at once. You have users of your product and service. Where are they struggling with it? Having some intellectual humility and dropping the ego a bit to be like, "Ah, okay, I got you. I thought this was gonna be helpful. It wasn't. My bad. Let's pivot, I got you." That's been deeply productive and effective in cities all throughout the United States. We have many municipalities who are adopting what we call the Strong Towns approach, and we're seeing an actual boost in quality of life. It doesn't take much to paint a crosswalk, to install a streetlight. Little traffic calming interventions, stuff that actually translates to a better user experience. Whether you're a user of a software product or a constituent of your city and your neighborhood. So that one comes to mind initially. And then someone whom I really look up to, who I've never met, I just read about their work. Is she a philosopher? I don't recall her title. She does all the things, but her name's Elinor Ostrom. Kate Mueller: [41:19] Okay. Jacob Moses: [41:20] She wrote a book about the commons, essentially common areas that we all cohabitate and have some shared responsibility for. And she has this excellent term, and this hearkens back to Care Block’s work in understanding that people like to communicate in different ways and to show a lot of grace in that. They might be rambling for a bit. They might maybe call you a couple of bad names because they're angry. But to understand that we're going to get to the crux of the problem that we can work around. Eleanor has this great term called “cheap talk,” where essentially we need to have really hard conversations in places in which people feel comfortable, which isn't always necessarily, say, city council chambers. It may not be in live Slack chat or something with your users, as you're trying to understand ways in which you can improve the product or service. Her work in cheap talk was like, we need to kick it with people in their rec centers, in their community centers, on their street corners, and let them talk how they talk. Not to come in with these perfect little buckets, and how they have to be heard for you to recognize what they need. To let homies ramble. There's a great line in The Wire that goes, take it light, but take it. Jacob Moses: [42:39] That's the part of this work. I mean, we all love service, that's why we become tech writers. That's why we're in Q&A. It's why we are inventive and create new products and services. I mean, we see where people struggle and we want to do something about it. Cheap talk is a huge part of Care Block's work. We try so hard to demonstrate cultural humility and not to make any assumptions in what we think is best for somebody in terms of, we do a lot of reasonable accommodations for vision and mobility impairments. We never assume what that looks like. We hypothesize because we're professionals in this. We have expertise in actual fixtures and furnishings that we think address mobility and vision impairments, but we understand that the end user is actually the expert. Understanding that it can take a while to get there, and to never judge or to have preconceived notions of what care and support looks like. And then of course, after someone feels like they're heard, which we say all the time, do you feel heard? I love my work at the Denton Affordable Housing Corporation. I was going through neighborhood meetings where you had neighbors who didn't want to have an affordable housing project in their backyard. NIMBY is a common term. Not in my backyard. Kate Mueller: [43:59] Not in my backyard, yup. Jacob Moses: [44:01] I empathize with the suburban dream you're promised by your realtor 30 years ago that your neighborhood would never change. You'll never have new neighbors. You can always pull into your garage, close it behind you. And a verse from Harvey Milk, another person I just so look up to, R.I.P, just see the world in not so perfect color. That’s how we reorient ourselves towards the street, so even in the user experience, a lot of our public engagement, we never rolled our eyes, never talked mess. Let people say what they need to say and always finish with “Do you feel heard?” Which is also great work I think in technical documentation that you want to make sure that user feels understood. And there's a term in healthcare–motivational interviewing–where you actually want patients to say back to you what you said, how you interpreted their needs and their struggles and their hopes and dreams and goals and such. And that's all stuff I learned as a tech writer. The kindness and the empathy and just being, the phrase I use is “pro-homie”. Like we're just always about homies. And if you're always pro-homie and you're always pro-block, the world works in your favor. I truly do believe that. And all that work is from being a tech writer, being a storyteller, understanding brand and consistency, and demonstrating thoughtful ways to respond to queries. All stuff that happened because of tech writing and because I met Marybeth in Boulder and ate jumbo shrimp at Survey Gizmo. Kate Mueller: [45:38] Very nice. You mentioned having humility in those conversations. I think as tech writers, we often have to center humility because we are talking often internally to subject matter experts who know way more about the thing than we do. But we also are often talking to end-users and recognizing that our experience and what we know about the product might be very different from what their day to day looks like. And so both humility, but also asking questions and actually listening to the answers, asking questions to get information or to get perspective, not just to make it seem like you're asking questions or pretending that you're hearing people, but actually hearing people actually paying attention to what they need is huge, I think. Jacob Moses: [46:32] It is very much so. And it's a very humbling experience because sometimes, guess what? They might be right. They may not have the title that would associate that expertise, but you're like, oh, further again, my bad. You're right on this. And then what's just a great experience just as a human as well. I mean, your brain gets a little bigger, your heart gets a little bigger, the product gets better. I mean, you and I talked offline, Kate, about just the collective call to action to take ourselves less seriously and how we assign expertise, and expertise for whom and by whom. Kate Mueller: [47:09] I was a KnowledgeOwl customer before I ever worked here. So I was an end-user for several years back when it was still Help Gizmo, in fact, that's how long ago I started. And then I started working here. And I thought as an end-user that I understood the product really well. And then I started working here, and I realized that almost every end-user I talked to used the product slightly differently from the way I did. So I was an expert in the way I used it. But what I learned was that every single user puts their own stamp on how they use your thing. And so there's always exciting stuff you can learn from them. I feel like every time I do a customer call, even now 11 years later, maybe? Even now, I'll get in and I'll be like, "Oh, show me how you do that", and be like, "I've never seen anybody use the product that way before in 11 years. But it's interesting. It does fit what you're trying to do really well.” And sometimes there will be some other element I can pull in and say, "Oh, but this part of this process feels like you're doing a lot of extra work. We do have this feature that does 80% of that. Have you tried using that and you didn't like it? Did you not know that it existed?" And sometimes that leads us to a really interesting, collaborative place of being able to say, "Oh, maybe we can tweak what you're doing. You can keep however much of it you want to keep, but maybe we can remove 15% of the work you're doing, because you can pull in this other feature that's not perfectly designed for this, but it's close enough, and we can find a way to get you there that feels still authentic for you, but also slightly less complicated." Jacob Moses: [48:55] Oh, absolutely. And even going back to the conversation of an organization's solvency and how lovability can be a top line item on financial statements. We do all this with sincerity and genuineness and authenticity, and we never want someone to feel like it's extractive or insincere, but the more that someone feels that they're a part of something, they become advocates for the product as well. And that's what I experienced with KnowledgeOwl. I was tight with Marybeth, I got to know yourself. I got to know Chad. And I don't even want to shop around. There might have been other knowledge base softwares, but I didn't care. Granted, my previous board of directors, please do not inquire because DAHC also used KnowledgeOwl and I promise I was a fiduciary for our dues and subscriptions line item on our financial statements. But again we don't want anyone to of course worship an organization. But they become a bit of an acolyte. They become marketing collateral for you, which can of course improve revenue. And everyone's just game for it. Again going back to doing well by doing good principles. Kate Mueller: [50:16] I like to do business with people I like, like if I'm looking at two products that are the same, but I've had way better interactions with one of those companies, that'll be the one that I choose 100%. It was also a big piece of why I chose Help Gizmo back in the day. I was a little software company. We were a little bootstrapped software company. I was not happy with our current documentation platform. And then I found what was then Help Gizmo, and they were a little software company, and I could tell in every interaction with them that they valued having good human connections as much as I did. And I was like, this is rare in the software world, and I like supporting software companies that seem to care about people. I'd rather see those companies do well. Jacob Moses: [51:02] And I don't know if this is an appropriate sidebar, I want to be conscientious of your listeners who maybe are unconcerned about housing community development, which I just keep talking about. But I've generally opted out of the AI game. It's not really applicable to my work, but I'm curious. I'm sure it's top of mind for many tech writers, especially on all the forms of help documentation, chatbots, software documentation, all the goodies. Have there been conversations about the relationship between AI and somehow trying to maintain the humility and interest in user experience for folk these days? Kate Mueller: [51:36] Yes, I would say there have been. I say this because I keep having them, so I'm sure other writers are having them as well, because for me, that is …the distinguishing factor for me is that I don't think AI can have empathy and we as humans can have empathy, and that's a thing that we bring that no amount of tooling will ever bring. You might use AI to streamline certain things, but I think the companies who believe that AI is going to fully replace tech writers, for example, are really underestimating how important empathy is in what makes good documentation good. Jacob Moses: [52:22] Absolutely. Kate Mueller: [52:23] That's not just words on the page. And so I think that is one of the ethical considerations that people are trying to wrap their heads around, while also recognizing that a lot of us work in software and have a lot of pressure to incorporate AI into our workflows. And how do we do that in ways that actually feel helpful and useful, but that also aren't necessarily feeding some of those models information that they can then use somewhere else that they shouldn't have access to, or without compromising the integrity of what relationship we've already built with our end-users. For me, that's the thing that's always top of mind when we start talking about AI is we have done a whole lot in our own documentation to start with empathy. And my concern of adopting any AI tool heavily into that workflow is that it decenters empathy and instead just centers efficient production of documentation. But efficient production of slop doesn't feel like it's useful. Jacob Moses: [53:32] Snapping! Kate Mueller: [53:36] That's it. I'm gonna have that mental image of you just snapping every time I get into one of these conversations now. Although on that note, as we're thinking about what's useful, what's not useful, what makes for good docs because we've had such a far ranging conversation and you have mentioned some lovely resources on thinking about public common spaces and other things. Are there any other resources that you would love to share with our listeners that have been impactful for you, or that might just get them thinking creatively about things? Jacob Moses: [54:10] Generally speaking? As it relates to documentation? All the goodies? Kate Mueller: [54:15] Anything is fair game here. It doesn't have to do with documentation at all. Jacob Moses: [54:19] A book that changed my life. Again, the weirdness of people offering me things I don't really have the merit to do. Madcap invited me to speak at their MadFlair conference. Kate Mueller: [54:32] Oh, wow. Jacob Moses: [54:33] When was this? Gosh. Crazy. But I was working at Rainmaker Digital at the time. I was like a year into that gig, and they were like, you and The Not-Boring Tech Writer. Come give two one-hour long presentations at Madworld in San Diego, the Gaslamp district. I was like, well, this is crazy. Okay. I'll go. Flew into LAX. Rode the Amtrak into San Diego. It's a crazy business, but one of the two presentations was “How to Build Your Influence as a Tech Writer.” And the last slide that I showed was a quote from Anne Lamott, a writer who I adore. Shout out Anne Lamott. I have all of her books everywhere, all over my home, and I might butcher it. I'm gonna try to say it. So it's a book, essentially. It's sort of a how to write book, a sort of a self-help book. It's kind of like Stephen King's On Writing, where he hits everything. Kate Mueller: [55:35] Bird by Bird. You've got to be referring to Bird by Bird. Jacob Moses: [55:38] Yeah, Bird by Bird. Yeah. I'm. I didn't even say the title. That's my bad. Kate Mueller: [55:41] It's all right, I got you. Jacob Moses: [55:43] Yeah. There's a chapter in there that goes, have the courage to believe that what you think has some merit and to put it down on paper. Going back to our initial conversation about the value of documentation in terms of self-reflection and being able to look back at it and build around it. It's highlighted somewhere here. I'm a crazy post-it flag kid, and I'm just looking at stacks on stacks of post-it flags. But that was the final slide of that presentation. I was framing influence in that presentation around maintaining the relevancy of tech writers and just wanted them to be loved on and how you could do that through having original thoughts on your space and sharing it with people. So yeah, Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird is a gift. So is Joe Jones. So are a bunch of other books by Lamott. Kate Mueller: [56:33] Yeah. She's fantastic. Jacob Moses: [56:35] Another one, I mean, just generally speaking, so much of my work today is realizing that if we're going to have more prosperous neighborhoods in which everyone you know is elevated–minorities, low income people, all of our homies– we have to tighten the feedback loop between policy and where the consequences of policy actually exist. So I've been really interested in the healthcare side of that. There's a book by Prabhjot Singh called Dying and Living in the Neighborhood that's fantastic. What got me into all this work is Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cit[ies]. Jacob Moses: [57:12] That book is a gift. She was in Greenwich Village in Brooklyn in the 60s, whenever Robert Moses was mayor and trying to run highways through Washington Square Park, which has now been a platform for major advocacy and change in the city of New York. That book is a gift. Am I listening to anything these days? I listen to The Not-Boring Tech Writer because homies on homies. Kate Mueller: [57:37] I hope you feel that we are doing justice to the original concept. Jacob Moses: [57:41] Absolutely. We're in a weird political space right now in this world. No matter what your ideologies are, I think we all see that stuff is not working. An interesting antithesis to that is Harvey Milk's, was written by Randy Shilts, who's a fantastic writer about the AIDS crisis and LGBTQ life in San Francisco, but wrote a book about Harvey Milk called The Mayor of Castro Street and a really lovely book and story about Harvey Milk and how he, as a gay man in San Francisco, was able to move a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds and ideologies, just because he empathized and heard where they struggled and wanted to do something about that struggle. So my mind is definitely very much deep in neighborhood quality of life these days, so that's what I'm reading. And yet, to the extent to which that's beneficial for people in their tech writing work and just trying our best to be good homies and good neighbors. Those are some nice little titles lately. Kate Mueller: [58:42] For some reason something in that reminded me of a book I read recently which was co-written, but I cannot remember the name of the co-writer, but it is also co-written by Jane Goodall and it's called The Book of Hope. For me, that one landed pretty heavily because a lot of it is him interviewing Jane, talking about how as somebody who is steeped in the climate crisis, how she still finds hope for the future. And there's some really interesting stuff in that. So maybe that's what I will share back to you as maybe this would be a good one for you. Jacob Moses: [59:22] Good. Yeah. I lost faith in this country a while ago. But I'll never lose faith in my neighbor or in each other. That's where we can get into some nice little rowdy business for our places. Kate Mueller: [59:32] Yeah, people can be amazing. And we already kind of covered, what's a great piece of advice you've been given because we were talking about the Pac-Man rule at Write the Docs, but do you want to talk further about it? Is there anything else you want to share here? Jacob Moses: [59:46] Pac-Man rule for days. Shout out Eric Holscher. I don't know what you're up to, but I hope you're well. Kate Mueller: [59:51] He's still doing Write the Docs. Jacob Moses: [59:53] Kicking in Portland. Kate Mueller: [59:55] He's gonna come back on here in a couple months. So we'll have him back. He is, I believe, currently traveling in Southeast Asia. Jacob Moses: [01:00:04] Wow. Kate Mueller: [01:00:05] You know, doing Eric things. Jacob Moses: [01:00:08] So another piece I keep all sorts of goodies, just like at my. I don't know when this was written. I'll show you. I know we're on video, but this is a random article from the New York Times. It's in the New York Times, Sunday magazine. There's no date on here, but it's super old. But this young lady, Joanne Rohde, I guess, at the time CEO of Axial Exchange, headlined, “On Knowing When to Get in and to Get Out.” But there was a passage in here about being a young person trying to find your first gig, and she's just like, do your homework on what a company does. Like, she talks about all the times that she's interviewed people and they're like, you actually don't know what we do. Why did you apply for this gig? Kate Mueller: [01:01:01] Wow. Jacob Moses: [01:01:02] So this is something I keep in my desk, not only in terms of prospective Care Block partnerships. We, of course, want to demonstrate that we've actually done our homework and know what you're into and how it can serve both of us. But we also very much lean on this in terms of cultural humility as well. Just to make sure that we're doing stuff because public life and urban design, I mean, people live in so many different ways. I used to live in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood, and I've never seen so many people party in their front yard for all the quinceaneras. I mean, that's Hispanic culture. They party in the front yard, which is such a gift. And then you recognize things that you can tell are for the good of a neighborhood, bringing parties back to the front yard instead of the backyard. But being deeply aware of not co-opting things or appropriating things. Yes, that's interesting work for us as well. Those are the goodies. That's what I'm pondering these days. Kate Mueller: [01:02:01] I love it. It's a lot to ponder. And then lastly, Jacob, if anybody listened to this and they were like, ooh, I'm really interested in Care Block or in anything that you had to say, and they wanted to get in touch, what would be the best way for them to do that? Jacob Moses: [01:02:16] Yeah, I remember I was pushing The Not-Boring Tech Writer on Twitter way back in the day, but I'm not a Twitter kid no more or X, I guess I'm not an X, at least not active there. The account might be floating around somewhere, but I'd say I'm most active if they want to learn more about Care Block’s work, just our website careblockdevelopment.com. You'll see a hyperlink icon there to our Instagram. So I hang out on Care Block's Instagram quite a bit. The handle is @careblockdevelopment and that's where we post about our projects, our housing, our block parties, and our economic development work. And then from there you'll find a weird web of other interests I might cross-post on my sidegig premium tinfish pop up that I run. It's called Sardinia. It's Portuguese for sardine, I love it. I am the Tinfish plug in Denton. Cats need to know. And then yeah, I'd say mostly Instagram. And then also in the bio of the Care Block Instagram, there's a link to our Substack. I recently started writing again, which I've just loved. There's a book, We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider, and he documents this moment where he feels like he can actually live another day if he chose to write. I've been so preoccupied with other tasks lately, but started writing again, and I do believe the body keeps score and I am feeling like, oh yes, I'm writing again. This is really cool. So just if you're curious to get more thoughts on the philosophical side of Care Block's work, myself and my dear baby brother Zach, hop on Substack as well. And of course, hop in DMs. I'm on LinkedIn. Jacob Scott Moses on LinkedIn. Kate Mueller: [01:04:04] And we'll grab links to all this stuff and drop it in the show notes. So don't feel that you have to rewind and listen exactly to it. We'll point you there. Jacob Moses: [01:04:13] Yeah. And we're just big advocates for, of course, just building prosperous neighborhoods everywhere. So if anyone's interested in real estate development and loving on their neighbors through real estate, there is an understandable bad rap for developers. They are gentrifying our places. They are extracting wealth, they are displacing communities. But there is a movement to essentially empower what we are as small-scale developers, where there is that cultural humility, the empathy that can translate to actual improvements in quality of life. So I am also happy to offer guidance in that work as well. Kate Mueller: [01:04:47] Well, thank you so much Jacob. This has been a delight and as always, thank you for your generosity of knowledge and ideas and spirit, I love it. Jacob Moses: [01:04:57] Yeah, thank you all. Thanks for making The Not-Boring Tech Writer still happen. I know kinfolk are feeling it and you're doing a great job hosting. Kate Mueller: [01:05:03] Thank you for starting it so I could inherit it. Jacob Moses: [01:05:06] And your colleague Chad, bless you with a mic. I love my new mic. Thank you Chad. Shout out Chad. Kate Mueller: [01:05:12] Shout out Chad, without whom this current iteration of The Not-Boring Tech Writer would not exist because he keeps everything running. He is the power behind the mic, I will say. Jacob Moses: [01:05:24] Shout out Chad! Thank you Chad. Kate Mueller: [01:05:31] The Not-Boring Tech Writer is co-produced by our podcast Head of Operations, Chad Timblin, and me. Post-production is handled by the lovely humans at Astronomic Audio, with editing by Dillon, transcription by Madi, and general post-production support by Been and Alex. Our theme song is by Brightside Studio. Our artwork is by Bill Netherlands. You can order The Not-Boring Tech Writer t-shirts, stickers, mugs, and other merch from the “Merch” tab on thenotboringtechwriter.com. You can check out KnowledgeOwl's products at knowledgeowl.com. And if you want to work with me on docs, knowledge management, coaching, or revamping an existing knowledge base, go to knowledgewithsass.com. That's knowledge with sass.com. Until next time, I'm Kate Mueller and you are The Not-Boring Tech Writer.