https://technicalwriting.dev Field notes from the frontier of technical writing. en-us Wed, 29 Oct 2025 21:47:07 -0700 https://technicalwriting.dev/embeddings/arithmetic/index.html Does word2vec-style vector arithmetic (e.g. vector("King") - vector("Man") + vector("Woman") = vector("Queen")) work in technical writing contexts? Wed, 29 Oct 2025 21:47:07 -0700 https://technicalwriting.dev/embeddings/arithmetic/index.html https://technicalwriting.dev/ai/agents/index.html What are docs for AI agents? How are they different than internal eng docs? Do we really have to maintain the agent docs and eng docs as separate docs sets? This page contains my notes on these questions. Wed, 25 Jun 2025 16:35:58 -0700 https://technicalwriting.dev/ai/agents/index.html https://technicalwriting.dev/ml/embeddings/tasks/index.html The models.embedContent method of the Gemini Embedding API supports a taskType parameter. This parameter lets you specify what kind of task the embedding will be used for. Let's try to deduce how this "task type" thing works. Thu, 15 May 2025 15:34:40 -0700 https://technicalwriting.dev/ml/embeddings/tasks/index.html https://technicalwriting.dev/ml/gn.html I used Gemini 2.0 Flash and a little Python to automate the process of removing code from over 200 GN build files. Here's how it went. Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:17:17 -0700 https://technicalwriting.dev/ml/gn.html https://technicalwriting.dev/analytics/sheets.html This tutorial shows you how to use Google Apps Script to export your Google Analytics data to Google Sheets. The data automatically updates every night. There’s also a custom menu item within Sheets to update the data on-demand. You can also optionally also expose the data over HTTPS to the public internet. Fri, 25 Apr 2025 15:00:12 -0700 https://technicalwriting.dev/analytics/sheets.html https://technicalwriting.dev/ml/pocketflow/index.html Pocket Flow's tutorial generator describes itself as an AI agent that analyzes GitHub repositories and creates beginner-friendly tutorials for codebase contributors. With its default settings, the output from TCK was frankly unusable. It did not produce a tutorial, and the writing was not geared towards codebase contributors. BUT! With very little tweaking, I was able to get content that is very well-suited for codebase contributors. I was not able to get it to produce veritable tutorial content, though. Mon, 21 Apr 2025 17:12:09 -0700 https://technicalwriting.dev/ml/pocketflow/index.html https://technicalwriting.dev/sphinx/bazel/context.html My experience of managing Sphinx projects with Bazel. Tue, 1 Apr 2025 16:43:36 -0700 https://technicalwriting.dev/sphinx/bazel/context.html https://technicalwriting.dev/sphinx/bazel/tutorial.html This tutorial shows you how to manage core Sphinx workflows through Bazel. You'll learn how to: set up the Bazel build system, build the Sphinx docs, inspect the built docs, spin up a local server to preview the docs, add a Sphinx extension to the Bazel build, and deploy to GitHub Pages. Tue, 1 Apr 2025 16:42:35 -0700 https://technicalwriting.dev/sphinx/bazel/tutorial.html https://technicalwriting.dev/ml/reviews/2024.html A review of how much (or little) the ideas from GenAI Outlook 2023 have panned out, and a discussion of potential future trends in 2025. Fri, 3 Jan 2025 12:41:04 -0700 https://technicalwriting.dev/ml/reviews/2024.html https://technicalwriting.dev/strategy/challenges.html There are 3 intractable challenges in technical writing. I do not believe we will ever be able to completely solve these challenges using only the practices and technologies of the 2010s. Fri, 3 Jan 2025 12:41:04 -0700 https://technicalwriting.dev/strategy/challenges.html https://technicalwriting.dev/embeddings/overview.html Machine learning (ML) has the potential to advance the state of the art in technical writing. No, I'm not talking about text generation models. The ML technology that might end up having the biggest impact on technical writing is embeddings. What embeddings offer to technical writers is the ability to discover connections between texts at previously impossible scales. Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:09:03 -0700 https://technicalwriting.dev/embeddings/overview.html https://technicalwriting.dev/data/intertwingularity.html I’m building a web crawler so that I can track how pages in my docs site link to each other and to the outside web more broadly. If a lot of my docs pages link to some particular page, then that page is probably important. PageRank Lite, basically, except with much more focus on intra-site backlinks. Wed, 16 Oct 2024 22:02:44 -0700 https://technicalwriting.dev/data/intertwingularity.html https://technicalwriting.dev/strategy/decisions.html A quote from Every Page Is Page One that has deeply changed how I approach technical writing. Tue, 15 Oct 2024 16:16:16 -0700 https://technicalwriting.dev/strategy/decisions.html https://technicalwriting.dev/www/pdf.html Just append #page=X to your URL, where X is the page you want to deeplink to. Thu, 11 Jul 2024 09:01:07 -0700 https://technicalwriting.dev/www/pdf.html