About Scot
Scot is a writer for Oracle. He's a slacker and smartass involved in content engineering, content architecture, big data, cloud computing, and other buzzwords related to technical crap. He loves his family, political books, jazz guitar, and the Minnesota Vikings. Scot is a proud father, so don't ask him about his family unless you have four hours to listen to him blather on about his kids.
Oh yeah: all opinions are his and his alone, blah, blah, blah, random legalese, etc.
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Category Archives: documentation
Whining: the other side of advocacy
One of the arts of any craft is learning how to deal with colleagues. And part of this is learning the give-and-take nature of relationships. I love the passion that comes from advocating a position strongly held. It’s good not … Continue reading
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Using Coltrane changes in documentation
In jazz, there’s a common method to get from one place in a progression to another. It’s called the two-five device (really it’s ii-V, but I want to convey that that it’s pronounced “two-five”). In music theory, the five chord wants … Continue reading
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Ba-dee-ya, publishing tomorrow
In the spirit of wabi-sabi, I’m thinking about using “ba-dee-ya” as a placeholder for my unfinished content. I have some deadlines that I won’t make and, rather than commenting out entire sections of text, I think I’ll include what I … Continue reading
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Context and confusion and twins
I’m a big fan of Every Page is Page One design. One of the tenets of an EPPO topic is that it sets the context for the content within that topic. This way readers don’t have to rely on our … Continue reading
Posted in documentation, EPPO
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Going beyond a shared understanding…sort of
As a writer working in the software field, I often hear a lot of ideas that aren’t expressed very well. Well, they’re expressed in specifications or in code. They’re just not expressed in actual communication that someone who doesn’t read … Continue reading
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Goodbye cloud. Hello big data. Oh yeah: nice to see you again, cloud
This week I started my new gig at Cloudera. I’m quite excited about the opportunity. Although, I already miss my colleagues and friends at Eucalyptus. It’s a big change for me. For the first time in seven years, I won’t … Continue reading
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Thanks for Nothing: Help that Sucks
I love Amazon. I used to work there for years. Most of their documentation is really good. However, I found the following help for downloading Kindle for Mac to be . . . well . . . please refer to … Continue reading
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Change and Stability
Well, it looks like I’ll be an employee of Hewlett Packard soon. HP bought the company I work for, Eucalyptus. We’ll be joining the cloud org. I find change a bit more difficult as I age. However, I still have … Continue reading
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In William Shatner-ese: Must. Work. Can’t. Blog.
I’m a few days out from the Write the Docs conference. Once again, the conference planners did an amazing job. I’d like to blog more about it, but I’m under a deadline. I have 17 days to finish about eight … Continue reading
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The Sphinx Kool-Aid Looks Great…But I Don’t Want to Drink It
After 16 years using XML, I’ve been tempted to switch to Sphinx. My new colleague at Eucalyptus, Kushal Das (http://kushaldas.in/) , has asked me to think about switching our DITA content to reStructuredText (reST). I tried Sphinx last year at … Continue reading
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