Latest / The Not-Boring Tech Writer / A peek behind the curtain: 2025 clips episode
Transcript
- Kate Mueller: [00:00:04] Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we explore topics and hear from other writers to help inspire us, deepen our skills, and foster our distinctly not-boring tech writing community. [00:00:21] Hello, my lovely not-boring tech writers. Normally in our schedule this would be an interview episode, but for a whole bunch of reasons, that didn't seem like a good idea. A lot of podcasts take breaks around the holidays, so some of this is a nod to the chaos of the holidays. But also, we wanted to give you something special to finish out the last of our episodes of 2025. And so we decided to do a compilation of clips from this year's interviews. A lot of podcasts do clips episodes, but they do them to focus on key themes for the year, and so they'll pull out clips from already released episodes to highlight those themes, and that's a great idea. I did not plan for it, but I also wanted it to be something you hadn't heard before, so I thought it would be extra fun to showcase clips that we had to cut from our interview episodes, or that we used in sound check, but weren't intended to actually be aired, so that we could give you a peek behind the curtain of awesome or amusing things our guests said that you haven't heard yet. Kate Mueller: [00:01:36] I guess I would consider this the "round robin" of guests: you don't know who's going to show up. One caveat I will say to that, though: we didn't decide to do a clips episode until we were already halfway through this year's recordings, so you'll notice that most of these clips are coming from the second half of the year. If you were a guest from the first half of the year, I promise this is not an intentional oversight; you are amazing. I would love to use a clip from your episode, I just didn't plan far enough ahead to include you, so you'll just have to come back and be a guest again if you want to make it into the clips episode. To prep you for what you're going to hear next, we have a couple clips from our pre-interview sound checks, so let me explain that process just a little bit. Before we begin recording an episode, I usually record a quick sound check with each guest, just to make sure that we're both sounding good. We'll do a quick little recording, I'll stop it, I will listen to the recording, and then if it seems like we need to make adjustments on microphones or, "Hey, can you take your dog out because I can hear the jingle of their collar", we'll make those adjustments. Then we'll do another sound check and we'll head into the full blown episode interview. These soundchecks are never intended to end up in a real episode, so they are a little bit of a fun peek behind the scenes. I think the couple guests whose soundchecks we pulled for this would be totally supportive of us using them. The majority of the clips are actually from interview segments, so from proper interview recordings, and most of these clips made it into our initial rough edit of the episode, but then got cut from the final edit. Most often they got cut due to time. We were looking to shave a minute or two off of the overall episode length, and whatever clip we pulled felt like it was a way that we could reduce that without compromising the integrity of the episode. Sometimes it's just for pacing purposes. It felt like some of the stories might have gone a little bit long and there wasn't a good way to cut them to be shorter, so we just cut them completely, and that's why I'm sharing them here. Kate Mueller: [00:03:51] Some of them are absolutely fantastic ideas, we just had to trim the fat somewhere, so to speak. So for these episode clips, I will introduce them a little bit more to set the context and the scene for you before we jump directly into them. With that in mind, let's get into each of our clips! Introductions are one of my least favorite parts of recording an episode, mostly because they have the most possible points of failure. I don't write or script them. I need to pronounce someone's name correctly, which is always a mildly stressful thing, no matter how straightforward their name is. It's funny how when you start doing an introduction, you completely forget how to say words. And I'm usually trying to introduce a bit of how I know the person while they're sitting there staring at me [laughter], so intros are hard [laughter]. Liz Argall offered to try to do her own as a way to change things up. Although we ended up using my less entertaining intro in the final episode, I still wanted to share her very gracious attempt at doing her own. Kate Mueller: [00:05:02] All right, Liz, take it away. Liz Argall: [00:05:04] Hello! Welcome to The Not-Boring Technical Writer podcast. Your host is the amazing awesome-sauce Kate, whose last name I am blanking on right now, so I'll have to redo that. Kate Mueller: [00:05:19] It's Mueller. Liz Argall: [00:05:20] Yes, that's right! Our amazing host is Kate Mueller and I am the guest, Liz Argall. I am a technical writer at large, and we're going to talk about all sorts of stuff: permaculture, and the Diátaxis framework, and how to be awesome and soft with yourself with your writing. It's all a process, man. It's all a process. Kate Mueller: [00:05:44] As I mentioned in the intro, our guest sound checks are usually just random conversations, never intended to make it into a real episode. However, I'm going to break that rule. In Liz Argall's case, I have to share part of her sound check, since she shared a vocal warm up that Charles Brandreth does that cracked me up, and I may or may not use this warm up now before my solo episodes. Liz Argall: [00:06:12] Testing 122. Testing 122. Kate Mueller: [00:06:17] Have you hit your "p’s"? Would you like some sibilance? Liz Argall: [00:06:20] Here's a wonderful vocal warm-up that [Gyles] Brandreth does every morning, which is how he still has good diction in his 70s. Every morning he goes to the bathroom in the mirror and he says: "hip bath, hip bath, lavatory, lavatory, bidet, bidet, douche!". Kate Mueller: [00:06:42] [Laughter] I love that. I might have to start using that. Liz Argall: [00:06:45] Hip bath. Hip bath. Lavatory. Lavatory. Bidet. Bidet. Douche. Kate Mueller: [00:06:50] Dennis and I also had fun with his sound check, so I wanted to share part of it—not for any particular reason other than: if you haven't listened to episode 22, this is a pretty good introduction to what you'll get with the two of us. Dennis Dawson: [00:07:05] It's fascinating how excellent I sound. I sound good because it's important that I impress people with the quality of my voice. Otherwise, they won't listen. Even if I'm saying things that are somewhat interesting, which is not likely, but it could happen. Kate Mueller: [00:07:27] [Laughter] It is incredibly important as a writer that you sound amazing, Dennis. So I'm glad that you have your priorities straight. Kate Mueller: [00:07:36] Sarah Walker's interview on teaching yoga and writing documentation was far ranging. We had a really good time and we had to cut this next clip for time. But to set the stage: Sarah and I were talking about the importance of establishing good foundations in both yoga and documentation. Sarah talked about how useful it was for her to be able to dig back into overview documentation on features she hadn't used once she had to go in and actually update new docs on them. This clip is what we cut immediately after that comment. I was sad to cut it because it's the only reference to "beginner's mind" in the interview, and that's a concept I believe we all channel often as tech writers, so I'm really happy I get to share it here. Kate Mueller: [00:08:24] The number of times I have done this in the KnowledgeOwl Support KB would probably be staggering to other folks to know, but if you haven't touched a feature in a long time and somebody asks you a question about it, or in my case, because I have been updating nearly the entire Support KB because of changes to the nav and the UI, I get into a feature and I'm like, "Thank goodness I wrote a good conceptual overview here, because I had forgotten some of the nuance in how this feature worked.” And in order for me to do a little bit of content reorganization and reapply my style guide, I really need to have a sense of the whole that I'm trying to manage. And man, that overview is useful, and some of the features I've run into, our oldest features, things that I didn't touch a lot when I took over the Support KB, I've gotten into those and been like, "Oh well, I need to write that now. That doesn't exist. There is no foundation pose here. I'm going to have to create it so that I can then build back into it." And you know that you have an uphill battle there, because there's going to be nuance that you forget coming into it retroactively. But it's also really useful because it's like you're a beginner on that thing, and it reminds you what that new user's journey is when they first come into the feature. So it's a nice, humbling moment. Sarah Walker: [00:09:46] There were a few of the instructors in teacher training who would always say, "Maintain beginner's mind. Always be open to learning. Always be open to being in that place where you're not sure exactly what's going on, what to expect, but nevertheless open to learning.” Because even when you are in the advanced classes and you're doing some scorpion poses where you're balancing on your forearms and your legs are up, and then you bend your legs and your toes are touching the top of your head; not a pose I could ever do. I am cursed with really wide hips. And then I have SI joint instability which made certain poses really difficult, especially as the years passed. But even when you're doing poses like that—what I would call the pretzel poses—you still have to approach it with the idea of the foundation. What is the foundation of this pose? In Scorpion, it's your forearms. Your forearms are on the ground. That is literally your foundation; you build up from there. If you don't have those forearms positioned well, if you are not mindful of how they are helping to support the weight of your body, how they are interplaying with gravity, your Scorpion’s going to fall apart and you could easily get hurt if you fall out of the pose badly. So again, it goes back to that beginner's mind. Where do I start? I've got to start with the foundation. In the documentation, in this one doc, what's the opening idea? What's the opening concept? What's the grounding concept? Let's build from there. And once you have your foundation, once that is steady and stable and you're aware of its steadiness and stability and you've grasped those concepts, then you start building on top of it. Sarah Walker: [00:11:56] And you don't build "willy nilly.” You have to sequence so that the reader, so that the student, can connect the ideas or the parts of the body. It's not like you can disconnect parts of your body, but if you're transitioning, like if you're in Trikonasana (triangle pose) and you've got your feet and legs in the position. And then you start thinking about where your hands should be, you've kinda lost it because you went from your foundation out to the windows. You didn't build the walls, you didn't put a roof on it, so your house is going to fall apart. In sequencing within a doc and even within a category and in a knowledge base, or even the whole of the knowledge base, you build your foundation, you present the key ideas, and then you build on them. You can't start talking about advanced features until the reader is understanding the basic steps, the basic how to's, the ideas that build on the core feature proposition. Like for product recs. Kate Mueller: [13:20] In this clip from Sarah Walker's interview, we were talking about the importance of sequencing, in both yoga poses and documentation. Sarah gave me this quick, lovely walkthrough on yoga pose sequencing. It was a little too detailed on the yoga side for me to feel like it fully fit in the published episode, but it was so good I didn't want to lose it. I can still picture Sarah gazing into some space kind of between us, moving some of her limbs as she talked her way through it. And while many of us might not know the details she's discussing, the thoughtfulness in the sequencing is something I suspect we can all relate to. Sarah Walker: [14:02] One of the sequences I really enjoyed teaching was eventually building into Warrior Three, with a variation where as you were one leg on the ground, one the same hand on the floor, and then the arm that extends up reaches behind, you bend the floating knee and you grab it, forming a lasso with your upper leg or your leg that's parallel to the floor. Some folks called it Shoot the Moon. I always thought of it as the Chandrasana, Half Moon pose. But you can't flow right into that. You have to go from Tadasana to, say, triangle pose to start that extension of the spine, opening of the legs, of the hips, extending out through the front body, through the back body, bringing the shoulders down, because you don't want your shoulders eating your ears being all hunched up. And again, finding that opening with the breath. Then you work from Triangle into Warrior Two to find the rotation of the hips and the bending of the forward knee to help warm up your hamstrings and your quads, and then start building toward Warrior Three, where both arms are extended, one leg is reaching back, one leg is still grounded. And then flowing down into Chandrasana with the hand on the floor, the other arm extended, opening still up. Finding that balance. Still maintaining your good foundation with that foot that's grounded. Finding that flow of breath, in and out of the body. You're not clenching. You're not holding your breath, trying to focus. Life is flowing. And then you can "shoot the moon,” you can bend that knee, you can reach back and hold on to your foot or your ankle and "shoot the moon.” Kate Mueller: [16:18] Ryan Macklin's interview on empathy advocacy gave me a lot to chew on, and it was also the first interview where I flagged a clip to be saved for this very episode. In this clip, Ryan and I were talking about working with customers who might be in a primed or triggered state. I'm sharing it now for two reasons. First, as someone who's worked in support off and on in my career, I really appreciated that Ryan is an empathy advocate, but that this advocacy extends to ourselves and setting and maintaining boundaries with customers. I think this is a point that often gets lost when we talk about support and empathy. The second reason I'm sharing it is a little bit more selfish. I wanted to be sure we shared Ryan's phrase of "absolute stick fuck" with the world, just in case you needed more phrases in your curse word toolkit. Ryan Macklin: [17:13] Here are reasons why they're going to be that way. It is not your job or your responsibility to accept their actions if their actions are crap. That is not on you, that is on them. But if you at least understand where they're coming from, then as long as they're not being complete—I don't know if you swear on this podcast… Kate Mueller: [17:35] Go ahead. Ryan Macklin: [17:36] The term I use for these people are "absolute stick fucks.” As long as they're not being that, then you're going to say, "Oh, hey, I know you're angry. You're not taking it out on me, but you’ve got that energy" or if you do take it out on me, maybe you roll back for a moment and say, "Hey, I apologize.” Cool. I know where you're coming from. I can kind of adapt what I'm trying to explain to you, knowing that you're in a primed state. But if somebody is, of course, being an absolute stick fuck, then you'd be like, “Okay, you actually need a time out as a customer.” I don't actually need to support you while you were doing this because, one, you're projecting that energy onto me, which is going to make my day harder and my moment harder with you, and then two, you're going to be less receptive to what I am trying to help you with. Kate Mueller: [18:29] 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: [18:52] Nick Graziade’s episode was recorded well before we thought up a clips episode, but there was one clip in it that was kind of a problem for me during the editing. I debated it a whole bunch, and I ultimately ended up cutting it for time. I was on the fence about it for so long that it had stuck with me. So once we decided that we were going to do this clips episode, I felt like we had to go back and find it. So we did a bunch of extra digging to go back and recover it, and I want to share it with you now for two reasons. First, Nick's very into philosophy, and this was his lone philosopher name-dropping moment. I want you to get to experience him in his full glory, just as I did. Second, once we shift past philosophers, we start to dig at the idea of content hierarchy as the only form of information architecture and how limiting that is, even though neither of us actually uses the phrase "information architecture,” this is part of what we're talking about. Nick talks a lot about the flaws of very deep hierarchies, and we both talk about the fact that hierarchy isn't the only way to help architect information for findability. That point kind of got lost as we cut the clip, and it also didn't totally hang with the rest of the episode, but it still feels like a point worth emphasizing, so here it is. Nick Graziade: [20:19] Maybe it'll be the last thing I say, but one of the things I bring into a lot of this is: I look at this from a standpoint of everything that I digest feeds into my technical communication career. I'll be very clear and say, “This is definitely my career. This is what I do.” I say it's my day job. I say my night job is being a musician, and my day job is being a technical writer, which is very true. But the point being, I think one of the things about dialectic, in particular dialectical materialism, where we're not looking at ideas here, we're looking at the actual tangible things you work with. And this is a term that comes out of the Frankfurt School and some modern thinkers. I'll throw some names out there so I sound important, but Theodor Adorno and Foucault and Chomsky and I'm going to talk about my favorite guy, Mark Fisher, too. A lot of these guys are looking at these dialectic, particularly from a cultural standpoint. And I think what becomes important is that we do have a cultural standpoint of technical communication that people actually get really fixed to. One of the things that makes me think about how I can restructure things, is a lot of people's kind of marriage to hierarchy, and I think I alluded to that a little bit earlier. But one of the things I used to do all the time was I'd train on SharePoint. And one of the biggest questions I would always get was, "So what folder is this in? What folder is that in? What folder is this in?" And the first thing I would have to tell people, which was usually the first slide of my presentation, was “A library is not a folder. It's a different thing.” And it's really critical when you're working on one of these state contracts, government contracts, you have really secure information that you have to keep locked down. But also people expected everything to live within this nested structure. And that's not how information often resides. Sure, you can apply one taxonomy to things and you can say like, “here's level one, here's level two, and here's level three.” But that can actually get really repetitive, and in its own right, become difficult. So if you have something that is level one, let's just call it, let's use a simple example and we'll say that the country is level one and the state is level two, and then the city is level three. That's an easy one to hierarchically organize because I don't have overlap between the things. The state of New York where I live, that's a state. The city of Troy, where I work, that's only going to be the city of Troy in New York if it's in the New York folder. And if it's another folder—if it's in the Michigan folder, I think there's a Troy, Michigan—cool, I just picked a random state that worked out pretty well. Well, I know you're from the Upper Peninsula, so that changes things a little bit. But anyway, regardless though, if I change that up, if Troy's in the Michigan folder, then clearly it's relating to the Michigan one. But let's look at something that's a little more nebulous. Like, what about something like the software that you're using that integrates with one another? So let's say you're using GitHub or something, and you have a connection between GitHub and Jira, which is what we do. We use that for our merge requests. And I could put it in the GitHub folder. I could put it in the Jira folder. I could put it in a third place. But there's not a very clear demarcation as to which has more importance. And I think a lot of people have trouble understanding that because I'll see these really thick directory structures that have subdirectories and sub-subdirectories and so on that are empty because they're trying to mimic the same thing over and over again. At a certain point I thought to myself, “that's not going to be easy to find anything.” So I created a library on SharePoint, and the only demarcation between different things was a whole set of metadata. So it's really more like sorting by Venn diagram rather than sorting by folder or hierarchy. We have to create a taxonomy. We have to create some kind of taxonomy and categorization. But what about that categorization can I then overlap with other things? Because then I can filter things and find exactly what I need much more rapidly than if I'm going: directory, subdirectory one, subdirectory two, subdirectory three. It's not always the easiest way to navigate. Sure, I could use a search function, but even then it doesn't give me the context of what's around it. I think having really well-defined metadata in these circumstances kind of eschews that idea of “everything has to live within a hierarchy.” And I think this modern idea of dialectic, particularly within the technical documentation space, is sometimes difficult to break from because you look at best practices, you look at the things that people have done for a long time and that have worked traditionally. Those are best practices for that reason because they have traditionally worked. But you also don't want to fall into the circular argument of “this has always worked, so why should we change it?” Having that kind of ability to think rationally about what you're doing, and then again, going back to what we talked about earlier, being able to justify why I'm doing this thing that's different, that breaks the rule—that's going to be such a fundamental aspect of injecting creativity and solving a problem in technical communication. I don't want people who are going to be so rigidly attached to a structure that you can't change it, even if there's a better way. Kate Mueller: [26:05] I think sometimes people use structure to do multiple things when that's not really what structure is there for. Somebody really has to internalize that hierarchy for them to reap the full benefit of a hierarchy that's that strict and also that deep. Part of what you're actually trying to achieve with that is this feeling of continuity and maybe organization. But really the underlying needs there are "How do I move laterally through stuff? This isn't exactly what I need, but I feel like I'm in the general neighborhood of what I need." If you make somebody go up three levels to then go down three levels to find the thing that should be somewhat related, your hierarchy isn't doing you any favors there. If you've got, let's say some tag metadata where they can be like, "Oh, I've found this thing. God knows where it is in the hierarchy, but it is on the topic I need, but not the exact task that I need." And you've got some metadata that helps them leap into other resources that are on that same topic, but a different set of tasks. You've now enabled them without having to internalize any of the fricking hierarchy, and without necessarily even understanding what they need to search for to browse their way through, forage through all of that information to find the thing that they actually needed. And I think sometimes we try to make hierarchy solve all of those problems at once, and content organization can't solve all of those problems. That's why things like metadata exist. It's why search exists. It's why we add cross-references and related articles and other things, because we know that people's brains work differently. And just because this hierarchy made sense when we built it to the people who we tested it with, doesn't mean it's going to make sense to the next person who walks through the door, who has to try to find the documentation here. So you want to enable those different methods of discovering the content and engaging with it and use the features that are custom built for that stuff and don't depend on your content hierarchy to do all of that work. Because it can't and it won't. And it will fail. Nick Graziade: [28:26] Yeah, that's spot on. Kate Mueller: [28:28] Oh, there we go. I sound really good at the end of this episode. It's beautiful. [00:29:31] There is one clip from a very early episode that a guest thought we would cut, and then we left it in anyway. So this is the only clip I'm sharing that actually is in a published episode, but that's because of how much I love it. In Janine Chan's episode, which was my second interview ever, we were talking about how to make things fun for yourself, and I asked Janine if there were any ways she'd managed to do that. Listening back to the episode, she doesn't fully answer that question, and I will have to spend a little time soul searching about whether I was a good podcast host or not there, but we ended up in a really funny exchange, especially considering that at the time we didn't know each other incredibly well and we have since become a lot closer friends. So I hope this makes you chuckle as much as it does for me. Janine Chan: [29:26] The more frustrated I got with it, the more I wanted to fix it, and the more satisfying it was when I figured out—I don’t even remember what it was. I think part of it is just what your brain enjoys fixating on, which is less of a Jedi mind trick, and I guess where it intersects with personality and the kinds of challenges you enjoy, because I find that the angrier something makes me, the more I enjoy fighting with it. And this is just work. This is not to say that I have incredibly toxic friendships or anything like that. [Laughter] Kate Mueller: [29:59] [Laughter] I would hope not. I was about to be very worried for you, Janine. Janine Chan: [30:04] As my friend, Kate. Welcome to hell! [Laughter] Kate Mueller: [30:10] [Laughter] I'm now second guessing everything about my personality and why we stay in touch. Kate Mueller: [30:17] Kate Pond's episode dropped right as we were compiling this clips episode, so we didn't have a lot of turnaround time, but I also didn't want to leave her out. In our conversation we focused on her daily check-in form, and since that seemed like the most useful thing, that's largely what we focused on in the published episode. But for those of you who read the blog post [“Google Forms for Self-Evaluation”], you'll know she mentions both a daily and a weekly check-in, and this is the brief sidebar we had about weekly check-ins. Kate Pond: [30:46] My weekly evaluations were like: “What did you accomplish last week? Did you accomplish last week's goals? Do you have anything to say about last week's goals? What went well this week? What needs improvement? What are your goals for next week?” But a lot of that stuff was covered in the daily. Kate Mueller: [31:04] Yeah. It's almost like you could do some kind of aggregation from the daily into the weekly. Kate Pond: [31:11] Yeah. Kate Mueller: [31:12] I mean, right now I have a weekly thing. We do a weekly check-in at work. And I do find the, “how did you feel at work this week?” as a collective like overall, “how do I feel?”—my 1 to 10 or my 1 to 5 scale or whatever—sometimes looking at that in retrospect for the whole week, rather than the ups and downs of individual days. To me, that might be a useful data point, but that's one question [laughter], right? A lot of the other daily stuff you could accumulate, but it also might be a little interesting to be like, “let me rate overall how I felt at work this week or how I felt about what I was doing this week.” Kate Pond: [31:54] Yeah. So you can definitely still have a one-question weekly evaluation if you want it. Kate Mueller: [32:02] I struggle with the weekly because I only have the weekly and I forget what I did early in the week. By the time the end of the week rolls around and I'm like, “I know I did more than this. Crap. I don't know what it was, though. Was it just that it was forgettable? I didn't like it? Was it so great that I've blocked out that it was work? I don't understand.” [Laughter] Kate Pond: [32:23] [Laughter] It would be pretty great if these Google Forms had some kind of reward. If it was like Duolingo rewards at the end of filling out your form. [Laughter] You got gems because you filled out your form at the end of the day. [Laughter] Kate Mueller: [32:40] [Laughter] This feels like an app idea to me, really, it feels like an app idea. Let me gamify daily reflection. Kate Pond: [32:46] That was kind of my goal as a founder, right? It was to come up with ideas to see what I could put together. Kate Mueller: [32:52] And that finishes our 2025 clips episode, which is also our final episode of 2025. Putting together this episode has reminded me just how amazing all of this year's guests have been. Y'all have been enthusiastic, passionate, funny, and generous human beings. Each of you left me feeling enriched and often gave me ideas or insights that stuck with me long past our recording. And based on our listener feedback, the same was true for a lot of our listeners. So well done and thank you. I can't wait to see you all next year for even more not-boring shenanigans. In the meantime, stay out of too much trouble, practice your vocal warm-ups, and if you have ideas for topics or guests, if there's a bit of the tech writing world that your life would be improved by hearing an episode on, or if you just want to tell us what you're getting out of the show, please message us on LinkedIn or Bluesky @thenotboringtechwriter or email at tnbtw@knowledgeowl.com. Kate Mueller: [34:01] 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. Until next time, I'm Kate Mueller, and you are the not-boring tech writer.