Lucie Le Naour, Technical Content Developer at Github, joins us in this episode of Knowledgebase Ninjas Podcast to share her experience of different technical writing work cultures, the difference between technical developers and translators, and how she ensures top quality documentation. Check out all the other episodes here.
Key Facts
- Lucie’s LinkedIn
- GitHub’s website
- Lucie holds a Masters degree in Bilingual Translation from the University of Westminster
- Lucie currently works as a Technical Content Developer at GitHub
- GitHub is one of the most advanced platforms for developers to maintain and build software
Key Takeaways
- Lucie has previously worked as a technical translator for Alpha CRC and as a Machine Translation Language Specialist at eBay, she currently works as a technical content developer at GitHub
- Lucie’s passion for valuable and user-centric content development led her to step into a technical documentation career
- Lucie uses the same tech stack as engineers for technical writing
- Lucie is working on document designing these days, which is the new trend in the technical writing industry
- Lucie’s team at GitHub is part of the professional services. Their main job is to develop programs and technical guides
- GitHub enables tech companies and developers to ship, build and maintain their software
- GitHub focuses on documenting the features and attributes of their tech products
- Lucie believes in simple and understandable technical documentation. “No matter how eye-catching your document is, if it’s not easy to understand, it will negatively impact product sales”
- GitHub recently launched its public documentation portal, where customers can leave queries and reviews
- Lucie’s mission is to provide clients with authentic and detailed documents that are also easy to understand
- To produce high-quality documents, make sure that they:
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- Contain highly valuable content
- Are easy to understand
- Do not take longer than two days to finalise
- Get published as soon as they are finalised
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Lucie’s Biggest Influence
Lucie’s biggest influence is the engineers she began working with, who taught her the usage of new tools to upgrade her technical documentation skills. They also helped her transform from a technical translator to a content developer and communicator. Lucie was able to merge both her skills and transform that into a new career path.
What documentation-related advice would Lucie give to her 20-year-old self?
“I learned a lot from the developers. I would like the technical content developers to try to work with all the departments because you can learn a lot of good practices from other domains.”