Technical Writing Uncensored

Seth Honda has a crack in his laptop screen in one very specific spot. Because of it, his browser window is always the same width. How many other people have that exact window size? Probably no one. That one detail made him easier to track online.

In my latest interview, Seth, the founder of 404 Privacy, explains browser fingerprinting, why "privacy is for criminals" is wrong, and the small steps you can take today.

What's one thing you've changed to protect your privacy online?

https://youtu.be/v5w5Red0Owc

2 days ago | [YT] | 0

Technical Writing Uncensored

Some companies think “senior technical writer” means the most senior technical writer at the company. Like there can be only one. Highlander rules.

That’s wrong. Senior is a level, not a throne. A company can have 5 senior technical writers, and at large companies they usually do.

That’s 1 of the misconceptions I clear up in my new video on the technical writer career path. I also get into the 2 ways people actually get into this field, why the bottom rung of the ladder is mostly decorative, and how LLMs are bending the whole path.

Did you come in through the front door (degree, certificate, coursework) or the trap door (QA, support, engineering, and one day someone made it official)?

https://youtu.be/PQ3KExIMTTo

4 days ago | [YT] | 0

Technical Writing Uncensored

Picture checking LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and a dozen company career pages every single day, only to find the posting you wanted is already gone.

Gale James got tired of that. So she built a scheduled job search with Claude that checked each posting against the company's real careers page and only showed her roles that matched her experience. Fewer applications, stronger matches, and by her estimate, hours saved every day.

On top of that, she built her own portfolio, doc evaluator, and documentation agent, and walks through all of it in this episode.

Are you using LLMs in your job search, or have you built any of your own tools? Tell me below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEm79...

1 week ago | [YT] | 0

Technical Writing Uncensored

Every week, another headline says AI might end humanity. And somehow the solution is always a product the same companies want to sell you.

I asked Anne Cantera and Brittney Ball whether we should actually be worried. Their answer: yes, but not about what the headlines say. The bigger risks are knowledge bases nobody governs, evaluators who only see what companies let them see, and a lot of people signing over their data without reading a single page of documentation.

https://youtu.be/A4uHCONezoI

So be honest: have you ever read the privacy docs for an AI tool before signing up?

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 0

Technical Writing Uncensored

Nakia Jackson told me something that reframed how I think about being good at anything.

You're not an expert because you stopped making mistakes. You're an expert when the number of people who can help you fix your mistakes drops from thousands to dozens. You've graduated to rare problems. New and exciting mistakes.

She also walked me through the ADA Title II deadlines coming in 2027 and 2028, what that means for every PDF and web form we own, and why "just let AI handle it" falls apart the second you need someone to be legally accountable for the result.

Plus, she writes murder mysteries about accessibility failures. Yes, really.

https://youtu.be/F2eAqAsyJCE

What's the most rarefied, nobody-else-has-this problem you've hit in your docs lately?

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 0

Technical Writing Uncensored

I was documenting a new screen once. Clicked into it, clicked back out, and everything went blank. Restarted the app, tried again. Same thing.

I sent Larry, the engineer, a quick video. He wrote back, "Cool, we broke the UI."

That's the part of this job nobody puts in the job description. We test every feature because you can't write instructions for something without discovering every way it's broken.

My new video covers what technical writers actually do, including the parts that surprise people.

Tech writers, what's the weirdest, narrowest expertise you've picked up from documenting something? I know some of you have truly cursed knowledge.

https://youtu.be/Zt1GyGzuyRc

1 month ago | [YT] | 0

Technical Writing Uncensored

Kythera Contreras was testing video games for a living. The spec docs never matched the actual game, so she started updating them herself between test passes. Her team let her keep doing it because everyone else got faster.

Then she found out that was a job title.

This episode covers the QA to tech writing path, why she runs her personal life in Jira with 1 week sprints, and what machine translation still gets wrong in localization. Also chain mail, gold leaf illumination, and pocket heraldry, because her hobbies have hobbies.

https://youtu.be/SJcloeUHqIU

What was your unexpected path into this field?

1 month ago | [YT] | 1

Technical Writing Uncensored

If your best work is stuck behind an NDA, I made a free worksheet for this. It covers what documentation postings actually ask you to prove, and how to sort your own work into what you can publish, what you can describe without naming your employer, and what you can rebuild as a sanitized version. Most of what feels off limits isn't.

Get it here: links.dianapayton.com/evidence-gap-worksheet

1 month ago | [YT] | 0

Technical Writing Uncensored

New interview is up with Anne Cantera, who advises enterprise CEOs on AI strategy and also helps small business owners who have never opened a chatbot in their lives.

She said something that reframed the whole conversation for me. A good conversation designer lives in the failure modes. Not the happy path. The happy path is easy. The skill is what happens when someone's last name breaks the model and the system just keeps asking them to repeat themselves.

That is our work. We have been designing for the moment things go wrong for years.

Also, Anne does not collect email addresses on her free resource site, which means she has no idea who she is helping. Tell her to start a newsletter in the comments and I will pass it along.

https://youtu.be/HPza9xSCAwY

What is the worst failure state you have ever had to write your way out of?

2 months ago | [YT] | 1

Technical Writing Uncensored

New interview is live.

Derek Ciula builds agentic systems for a living. He also thinks technical writers are better set up for this than most of the engineers he works with, which is not what I expected to hear from someone whose day job is architecture.


His argument, roughly: anyone can make an agent write documentation. Making it write documentation consistently takes someone who knows why the docs exist, who reads them, and where the whole thing goes sideways. That's not a developer side quest. That's a job.


Meanwhile the job market is out here demanding a Kubernetes expert who happens to write.


So which is it? Is this the golden era of the generalist, or are the job postings telling us what's actually true? Tell me in the comments.


https://youtu.be/l_zfg7m85kE

2 months ago | [YT] | 1