ffeathers — a technical writer’s blog

This is my first blog post. I’ll be blogging about a lot of things, mostly to do with technical writing. And I’ll pretty up my blog pages too. Stay tuned.

Here’s a quick introduction. I am a technical writer at Atlassian in Sydney, Australia. I love writing the documentation for products which ooze quality.

The weirdest thing I’ve ever written

An article about the Hash, published in Fair Lady magazine. No, not encryption but… see for yourself.

The most rewarding thing I’ve ever written

Face Technologies is a small software company in South Africa, producing cutting-edge biometric applications. They developed a pension payment system which solved a lot of problems for a lot of people. In the poorer parts of South Africa, many pensioners have to collect their payouts in cash. Also in the poorer parts of South Africa, many people are keen to collect payments meant for someone else! Face Technologies developed a biometric payment system. So now pensioners can identify themselves by fingerprint plus smartcard. I wrote the user documentation for the payment system, and some other interesting stuff for Face.

The first document I created from scratch for Atlassian

The Crowd team at Atlassian released Crowd 1.1 soon after I started work there. This release includes CrowdID – an awesome OpenID provider. I wrote the CrowdID User Guide. Our documentation is a team effort, written collaboratively on Confluence, Atlassian’s killer wiki.