Working at a regulated environment such as a bank, even in software, requires satisfying different areas of compliance. Different organisational structures ensure compliance with different areas of regulation, by mandating the existence of evidence, imposing checkpoints, and auditing projects and teams.

Coming from non-regulated software companies, my first realisation was …

A round table on authorship, ethics, and the evolving role of technical communicators in the age of AI

This presentation started as an unexpected opportunity to present at the ISTC Meets. Usually, the sessions are planned many months in advance.

API reference documentation is not usually considered sexy, but it can address a large number of minute decisions facing client developers. After recalling the base concepts of REST APIs, this session shows how to create a diagram that visualises the relationships between API operations and API definitions. The visualisation allows …

Domain models describe how users and stakeholders conceive part of a system or a product in useful detail. Domain models are artifacts, often UML drawings, that enable fruitful collaboration between business and technical people.

For technical communicators, domain models enable higher-level conversations with stakeholders and subject matter experts, inspiring documentation …

SIGDOC'2021 experimented with a mixed format that combined regular online events, both synchronous and asynchronous, with eight additional presential meetups called "hubs". For the Lisbon Hub, EuroSIGDOC interviewed Robert Pierce, Konstanze Alex, and myelf.

As part of the Farfetch F-Tech Talks, I reported on the tools and processes used at Farfetch to create and publish API documentation, and how they evolved over time.

The API documentation combines traditional DITA topics with API references generated automatically through Open API specifications. The generation of API references …

I wanted to attend the Technical Communication UK conference for years. The conference offered a reasonably priced residential fee in a countryside hotel. For a foreigner, this means an affordable conference, with more opportunities than usual to network with local colleagues.

Networking happed over breakfast, lunch, dinner, evenings... and even …

This talk and demonstration was presented at the Product Tank Lisbon meetup to a group of 36 people, including some technical communicators.

The three-hour workshop that I delivered at the Summer School had been accepted as a 90-minute workshop at the TCUK conference. Even after throwing away the screenplay part …

During the last TCeurope Summer School, I taught 12 people how they might use comics to communicate the effects of technology in people.

APCOMTEC (the Portuguese Association for Technical Communication) proposed the Summer School in 2018 as a first step to advance Technical Communication training at ISCAP (a school of …

The editor AsciidocFX turns the plain text format Asciidoc into an insightful drafting tool, even if Asciidoc falls short as a production writing tool.

AsciidocFX customizes the well-known Atom editor to handle AsciiDoc, a plain text format that is much better than Markdown but still weaker than ReStructured Text. AsciiDoc …

Being effective means that you make time to tackle your hard-to-solve problems, by solving the easy ones very quickly.

This talk was presented on 22 June 2011 at Agile Portugal 2011, which was held at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, in Portugal.

Managing a long-term agile team working on continuous improvements to a product creates specific challenges that are not usually felt in project-based approaches …

Ana Neves invited me to repeat the OSDOC'10 presentation at her event "Organização 2.0: Ferramentas sociais nas organizações" (Enterprise 2.0: Social tools in enterprises).

I repeated the presentation at ISCTE to an interested and enquiring audience.

References

Ana Neves is a consultant and the owner of Knowman, a …

Carlos Costa invited me to present my OSDOC'10 paper to his graduate students on open source software at ISCTE. The presentation took place in building ISCTE II, auditorium B203, Saturday, December 18th, at 11h00.

Attendance was open. The expectation is that invited classes at ISCTE might start a local community …

A small software company with a worldwide presence uses one wiki to store or access most company information. Using open source software, the wiki started as a small team tool and then grew to reach technical people. An innovative content strategy proposal later extended the reach of the wiki to …

This talk was presented on 26 June 2010 at Agile Portugal 2010, which was held at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, in Portugal.

Scrum assumes that a 2 to 4 week sprint can be planned in advance, with the work fully divided into 4 to 16 …

SHiFT was a grass-roots Portuguese conference about emerging technologies, whether they’re the latest internet trend or the latest social or engineering development.

Since SHiFT had an unconference part, I took the opportunity to test the presentation already prepared for OSDOC'10 on a small audience.

See the presentation at ISCTE …