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In this week’s episode of the Knowledgebase Ninjas Podcast, Gowri Ramkumar is joined by Paulo Victor, Senior Lead Technical Writer at Nubank. They discuss the concept of documentation engineering, key pillars of quality documentation, and the changing dynamic of the technical writing world.
Key Facts
- Paulo’s LinkedIn
- Nubank’s website
- Paulo comes from an engineering background
- Paulo was the first technical writer at Nubank
- Paulo has been in the technical field for around a decade
- Paulo holds a bachelor’s degree in English and Portuguese from Brazcubas Educação
- Paulo is certified by SAP Functional Foundations
Key Takeaways
- Paulo started his career as a Software Developer at Focusnetworks – Online Business Group in 2006. After which he joined TIVIT as a Software Developer and worked there for around seven years until 2017
- In 2018, Paulo pursued a bachelor’s degree in English and Portuguese while teaching and coordinating English and Spanish at The Family Idiomas
- After this, Paulo found a way to combine his two passions (language and programming), so he began his professional career as a Technical Writer for FITec
- In 2019, Paulo joined Nubank as a Senior Lead Technical Writer
- Paulo shares his “deep-dive approach” for creating technical documents, which is very different from that of the traditional documentation approach
- Paulo explains the traditional technical documentation approach is having technical writers dedicated to creating documents out of briefs. Whereas the deep-dive approach has a team of technical writers dive into each specific department, spend time with different teams, and learn and enhance their documentation skillset. Moving technical writers from one team to another is called the “rotational deep-dive approach”
- Paulo believes that being the first technical writer at Nubank has been a great learning experience for him. He spent most of his initial time understanding the organization, its needs, and the pain that the engineers go through
- Paulo believes that this initial learning, reading, and study of Nubank’s culture has helped him a lot in integrating proactive documentation approaches at Nubank
- Paulo acknowledges his coworkers and teammates contribution to his learning and growth
- Paulo believes that understanding a company’s culture helps technical writers deliver quality documentation in line with a company’s ideology
- Paulo uses in-house tools to organise informational architecture and content stages at Nubank. Paulo does this through a centralized gateway that serves as an entrance or hub of information
- Paulo believes that the technical documentation environment has revolutionised in the past decade. Technical writing is now more dynamic and agile. He further adds that technical writers must meet the growing pace of the world
Paulo’s biggest influence
- Andrew Etter – Senior Technical Writer at Amazon Web Service
Key resource
What documentation-related advice would Paulo give to his 20-year-old self?
“Keep doing it and it will become easier,” Paulo advises technical writers to not be overwhelmed by the technical aspect of documentation. The only way to deliver quality documents is to keep doing it until it becomes easier for you.
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