Core Dump 2.0

Having just had to interview some writers for a contract position, I’ve been thinking a lot about job interviews. One of the standard questions that interviewers like to use is “Tell me about yourself”. It can be a tricky question. US News has an article that talks about how to handle this question should you be on the receiving end.

“Tell me about yourself” is one of the most common openers to a job interview, yet job-seekers are often unsure what employers really want to hear in response. Should your answerinclude personal information? Should it focus on selling yourself, or just give the facts? What is the employer really asking?

Let’s translate it: “Tell me about yourself” in a job interview means “give me an overview of who you are, professionally speaking.” There’s a reason this is asked at the very beginning of an interview; it’s a way of saying, “Give me some broad background before we dive into specifics.”

You should be ready with a one-minute answer that summarizes where you are in your career, generally with an emphasis on your most recent job and the strengths of your approach.

If you’re a technical writer who’s worked on a large software project, you probably have had to prepare a software documentation plan. This article explains how to write one. Speaking from personal experience, I think it’s a very good article that should give you the basis for a solid plan. It does list a lot of things that may not apply to any particular situation but if you follow it, you won’t miss much.

What is a software documentation plan? This is a project plan for the technical documents you plan to write for the next software release. Like a standard project plan it captures the resources, requirements, costs, and deliverables.

As this is for technical writers, the documentation plan will focus on the content you intent to deliver; it may include the document format, estimated page count, delivery format and other such items.

I’m bookmarking this at work for future reference.

TechWhirl has published the first of my WritersUAsession summaries: HTML5 and CSS3 to the Point and User Annotations with HTML5.

By now, most writers know that both HTML and CSS have been updated with new standards. However, browser and tool vendors are just now beginning to support them. At WritersUA, Scott DeLoach and Dave Gash each gave presentations that covered aspects of the new technology that impact user assistance and thoughts on how we’ll be dealing with HTML5 and CSS3  in the coming year.

Update: I suspect that Scott Prentice would have included this as an example of just how powerful HTML5 is if it had been released before WritersUA. It’s a multiplayer online role-playing game written entirely in HTML5. It’s developed by the Mozilla Foundation and is being released under an open source license.

http://boingboing.net/2012/03/27/free-open-all-html-mmo-from.html