Technical Writing Samples – Bob Watson

These writing samples are publicly available examples of technical documentation that I’ve written. Except where noted, these samples are original works, written and edited by me with links to the online version. These samples are the proverbial tip of the iceberg insofar as much of my professional technical writing has been proprietary and is protected by non-disclosure.

Tutorial: Angular Documentation contributors guide

I wrote this tutorial to make it easier for contributors to update the Angular documentation. Prior to publishing this section, many documentation contributions would get delayed or ignored because the contributors were not familiar with how to submit an update successfully. This tutorial addressed the pain points and errors that contributors experienced and resulted in more successful community contributions to the documentation.

Tutorial: Sending an Amazon SNS notification

This is a tutorial that’s part of a series about Creating AWS IoT rules to route device data to other services that I wrote to address feedback from customers who were having difficulty getting started with AWS IoT. I researched, wrote, and tested the content and then it was peer-reviewed and professionally edited before publication. Note that the in-page links might not work in the local download (PDF).

Conceptual: MaxPerfXpsDocs

This is an oldie but a goodie, but it’s the only conceptual help doc I could find in my portfolio that isn’t an academic paper. I wrote it based on SME-input and self-experimentation, and it was professionally edited before publication.

Academic: Using Readers And Organizations Goals

For a more recent conceptual document (albeit in an academic journal article) on how to collect feedback on different types of online help content, which I co-wrote and edited.

API Tutorial: piClinic Tutorial

I wrote this tutorial this summer as a part of my research on the piClinic Console (https://piclinic.org) to help developers use the API on which the console’s software is built. I also wrote all of the code examples for this tutorial: https://github.com/docsbydesign/piClinic_API_sample.

API reference: piClinic API

This is an API reference topic for the API featured in the piClinic Tutorial document. I wrote this topic based on the original design and PHP source code.

Essay/Blog Post

I wrote this post on customer-focused documentation before I started working for them. The content is based on information obtained from a collection of independent research, conference presentations, videos, and blog posts—all of which are linked from or cited in the post. The post is currently live on this website.

Narrative/Tutorial: Aircraft Headset Adapter

An example with some soldering-related content, I developed this project for amateur radio. I adapted the circuit from several different articles cited in the post and designed the package. The blog post is currently live on this website.

Other examples of my work

In addition to the preceding samples, the following are other types of content I’ve published. You can also find my academic publications listed at Publications, many of which discuss aspects of developer documentation.

Public Speaking (videos)