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 set: Tilia tutorial set

I developed this set of tutorials to help new customers learn how to apply the Tilia API to their application. The Tilia API supports several customer use cases, and this set of tutorials uses Postman collections and sample code in JavaScript to demonstrate how to use the Tilia API in those cases. The tutorial overview and its subordinate topics helped ease the customer support workload by providing code examples that addressed many of the questions they were fielding from new customers. I wrote the documentation and the code examples in this tutorial set, and they were reviewed by subject matter experts before release. My last contribution to this documentation was in March 2024, but it appears to be relatively unchanged since then.

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 overview and its subordinate topics addressed the pain points and errors that contributors experienced and improved community contributions to the documentation. My last contribution to this documentation was in January 2023, but it appears to be unchanged since then.

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). My last contribution to this documentation was in April 2022, but the content appears to be relatively unchanged since then.

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 experimentation. 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 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)