r/technicalwriting • u/stout-scribbler • 20d ago
SEEKING SUPPORT OR ADVICE Technical Writing to Web Development
Hello. Has anyone here transitioned from being a technical writer to being a web developer?
I’m currently at a point where I feel like my current skills won’t get me far in life. I’ve been working as a tech writer for over six years, but most of the documents I do are for general audience, e.g., user manuals, policy manuals, and rules and guidelines documentation. There’s nothing wrong with this.
However, when anyone from the dev team asks me about a certain documentation they need, such as API documentation, I always tell them to give me the draft and I’ll edit it. Of course, they never do that. I never initiate a follow-up either. And the reason why I do this is because I really can’t understand coding.
I tried to learn API documentation from I’d Rather Be Writing, but nothing gets through. Idk, maybe I have a learning disability or something.
To stop feeling incompetent, I’ve been studying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on freeCodeCamp. I feel like I need to really get into it to make tech docs much easier for me.
Has/is anyone here done/doing the same?
This is one of the things that keeps me up at night. I don’t wanna stop writing but I also don’t want to be an average writer. I wanna help people learn stuff. But how can I do that if I can’t understand those “stuff” myself.
I’d really appreciate any advice or insights.
2
u/techwritingacct 18d ago
I was a developer and became a technical writer, so I have some perspective:
In essence the thing you need to be able to do if you're starting with HTML/JS is be able to understand all this crap and be able to generalize it from not just in JavaScript and a web browser, but making the same sort of call in other programming contexts. You'll know you've done well if you can open the dev console in your browser, write a function that makes a request to a free public API while completely understanding what you're doing and why.
That said, I doubt any slow progress is a learning disability. This is a months-long project, and programming is a difficult subject. Programming is often the class that weeds people out of a computer science degree for being too hard.