In this episode, Ian, Laura, and Wesley talk about the importance of communication skills, specifically writing, for people in technical roles. Ian calls writing the single most important meta skill you can have. And the good news is that you can get better at it, with deliberate practice!
Ian and Wesley both come from engineering backgrounds but have moved into more writing-intensive roles as their careers have progressed. Laura is an instructional designer with experience across many industries. They all agree that writing plays several different important roles for people, whether it's to educate, persuade, or even mark a decision.
So if writing is such a critical part of what you're doing from an engineering perspective, how can you get better at it? Laura offers a handful of practices, including providing context, supplying the appropriate level of detail for the audience, using stories or analogies, incorporating repetition, and finding a good editor (even if it's yourself coming back to a piece with fresh eyes).
The guests close the episode by sharing some of their favorite resources for improving communication skills, which are listed below.
Links from this episode31. Building Docker images with Cloud Native Buildpacks
30. The Infrastructure Behind Salesforce's Chatbots
29. Technology and Art
28. Effective Leadership Development
27. Behind the Brand with Heroku's Lead Designer
26. Connectivity in the Woods
25. Building Enterprise-Level Applications with Web Components
24. Side Projects for Fun and (not necessarily) Profit
23. The Changing Landscape of the Tech Industry: Diversity
22. The Changing Landscape of the Tech Industry
21. Building APIs that Integrators Want To Use
20. Becoming a Junior Developer
19. Securing the Web with Let's Encrypt
18. The Making of Trailhead
17. Integrating Terraform with Heroku
16. Accessibility in Web Standards
15. Pursuing a Career in Tech
14. Talking About Talks
13. oclif: An Open Source CLI Framework
12. Mindfulness at Work
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Insight Story: Tech Trends Unpacked
Zero-Shot
Fast Forward by Tomorrow Unlocked: Tech past, tech future
The Unbelivable Truth - Series 1 - 26 including specials and pilot
Acquired