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.
Category Archives: documentation
Geez, I forgot how time-consuming a baby is…
This little guy is keeping me from blogging. Not complaining. Just explaining.
Posted in documentation
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So, 29 Years After My Oldest Was Born, I Adopted Again…
Cedar was born on June 9th. That’s why this blog has gone dark for a while. Well, that and I’m a lazy ass. Back to Cedar: Holy cow. You’d think after parenting for nearly 30 years, I’d have some father-like … Continue reading
Posted in documentation, parenting
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Not Dead: Responsive Communication
My wife occasionally sends me text messages which, in my mind, do not require a reply. You know, things like a status update or a quick note that she’s running late. It’s informative for me to know. However, I didn’t … Continue reading
Posted in documentation, writing
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Wabi-Sabi Writing
My limited understanding of the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi is that it is an insight in which you can appreciate the beauty in the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. I don’t know about things you write, but imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness … Continue reading
Posted in documentation, writing
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Semi-colon-oscopy
Stop using semi-colons in your technical documentation. You can stop reading now if you pledge to delete your semi-colons. If you don’t make such a pledge, read the rest of this riveting blog entry. I used to use semi-colons in … Continue reading
Posted in documentation, grammar, writing
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Reflections on Write the Docs Conference, 2013
I was pleasantly surprised by the Write the Docs conference. It cost about 10% of other documentation conferences and had nearly the same amount of great ideas. That’s a tremendous deal. Plus it was in Portland. In a McMenamins. With … Continue reading
Posted in documentation, writethedocs
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The Te of Piglet: The Writer in Agile
Traditionally, Agile development has used the terms chicken and pigs to delineate two types of people involved in the development process. The cliched Agile fable goes: A pig and a chicken are talking to each other. The chicken says, “Hey … Continue reading
Posted in agile, documentation, writing
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No Joke: Eucalyptus 3.2.2 Released on April 1st
We just released the latest version of our private and hybrid cloud software. This is a maintenance release, so there are no new features. But we fixed some storage issues, did security updates, and got various other things working more … Continue reading
Posted in documentation, Eucalyptus
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Minimalist Documentation: How about a Haiku?
At Eucalyptus, we’re about to go through a documentation content audit. One of the goals of this audit is to see where we need to rewrite our content more concisely. When done well, concise content makes for easier understanding, and … Continue reading
Posted in documentation, minimalism
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