Amalia Hurtado conquered wikis (and you can, too) | Technicalities

Amalia Hurtado, Technical Publications Manager at Spatial Corporation, is the featured speaker for our September 15th program, ?Mastering Product Documentation in a Wiki.? She is versatile, multi-talented, and can handle almost any software tool that comes to mind. And apparently she doesn?t approve of web pages that include huge blinking eyeballs, as she explained in a recent interview.

Getting started: ?I first discovered technical communication in my last semester of college. The University of California, Santa Barbara offered a single course in technical writing, which was required for engineering majors; I was the only liberal arts student in the class. Although I spent my first two years in college studying Computer Science and ultimately decided upon a degree in English, I knew that I did not want to give up on the idea of working in the technical field. Within a year of taking that class, I began my career as a technical writer at Advanced Computer Communications (now part of Ericsson) in Santa Barbara documenting bridges and routers. My career in technical communication has been the perfect blend of combining my interests in computer science, creativity, and writing.?

Best project: ?My favorite project came to me in 1996 when having a company presence on the World Wide Web was in high demand. My then employer had contracted a professional Web design company to create their first Web site. I overheard that my employer was dissatisfied with the work done, especially with how it was organized and its graphic images (a huge blinking eyeball on the company home page). So I volunteered to create a new Web site from scratch. Not only did I have a heavy workload as a Technical Publications Manager at that time, but I had never worked with HTML or use tools such as Photoshop. I promised to design and develop their Web site on my own personal time. And I did. My employer was very happy with the new site and I became the company?s first Webmaster. Since then I have not only worked as a technical writer, but also as a Web designer/developer, and a graphics illustrator.?

Advice for beginners: ?For those interested in pursuing a career in technical communication, I would advise that they work as an intern first. This would be a good opportunity to learn what the job may be like on a day-to-day basis: they would have exposure to the most routine tasks and to some of the more challenging ones. They could also learn where their strengths lie: editing, writing, or drawing and design. And nowadays, more and more colleges are offering degrees or certificates in technical communication. This could give them a better advantage over others wanting to break into the same field. If a degree in Technical Communication is unfeasible, then take as many classes as possible for the tools used in the profession such as FrameMaker and Photoshop, and they should also educate themselves about the latest trends and development processes in technical communication. And finally, I would say that they should join a professional organization such as STC and attend the meetings. There is a lot of great information that is shared at those meetings; they reveal how the profession changes and grows, the variety of tools used, and they can learn so much more by simply speaking with others about what they like and may not like about the profession.?

The long road from UNIX to MediaWiki: ?When I began my career in 1990, I wrote technical manuals on a UNIX mainframe system, using WYSE terminals (when green was the only monitor color available) and VI as the editor. I?d make a change, send it to the dot matrix printer, and then realize I needed a better page break. Ack!

?Ah! Then WYSIWYG came along?

?Since then I have used Microsoft Word, Pagemaker, QuarkXpress, RoboHelp, FrameMaker, WebWorks Publisher, and now MediaWiki. Other supplementary tools include Sharepoint, Photoshop, FreeHand, Illustrator, screen capture programs, Camtasia, and Acrobat. For Web development, I have used DreamWeaver, FrontPage, and other HTML editors. For managing Agile stories and tasks, I use Rally.

?The main tool I use today is MediaWiki (and of course, the big three browsers), but I also administer the backend of the system. Thus, I use Microsoft Visual Studio to create and edit extensions to the wiki, and to edit exported wiki content in XML. I also use Visual Studio to edit PHP, Python, and HTML code to perform maintenance tasks and to ensure everything runs as it should on a Linux server. (This is where I exercise my knowledge of UNIX commands from my very first job as a technical writer.) Other important tools I use include Doxygen for generating our library reference documentation, Lucene which is the open-source search engine we use with MediaWiki, Araxis Merge for file/folder comparison, and Xenu (a link checker program).?

Come meet her and learn more at Amalia?s presentation on Sept. 15th. Register by Sept. 12th if you?d like to join us for dinner and networking before the meeting.

Source: http://stcrmc.org/wordpress/?p=1355

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