My first reaction after learning about my strengths was, “Hey this is great. Now I know my strengths, so what?” And this reaction is common for those that have done their strengths assessment and are looking at their report for the first time. Another question that I keep asking myself is, “How do I make use of my strengths to improve my situation?”

I wanted to build a static website for a new website to host stories that I have wanting to write from a long time. I spent a long time thinking about what to use to build the story website. I considered a lot of options: Wordpress, Joomla, a custom PHP based website to help with reusable components (for headers, footers, menus, etc). After thinking about it for a while and also after a lot of Googling I felt pulled towards using a static site generator.

In my previous post I shared my fears of a potential frostbite as I stubbornly (or stupidly) continue to use my barefoot shoes in the winter of 2017-18 in Toronto. I now find myself not that fearful. Multiple people have written blog posts on the web where they have expressed their dispair about not being able to find shoes that remain faithful to barefoot and natural movement while still having qualities that can keep their feet dry and warm. I share their dispair.

All I want for Christmas and everyday before and after is to be able to walk in the Toronto winter (and later spring, summer and fall too) in my brand new Prio shoes made by XeroShoes.

Entrepreneurship is a profession like any other. Just like you want to become an astronaut, an anthropologist, an oncologist or a librarian you might want to become an entrepreneur. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary describes an Entreprenuer as someone who “organises, manages and assumes the risks of a business enterprise”.

All this while I was updating my code on GitHub the long way, the visual way. I was recently taught the command line way to update my code on GitHub. This post was updated on GitHub using the Git commands.

Throughout your life, right from the time you are born, till the time there is no one alive who knows your weaknesses, all that people talk to you about is how you can be a better kindergartener / high schooler / undergrad / post-grad / worker / manager / patient / father / husband / grand father / and so on and so forth. You begin to expose your weaknesses with the very first evaluation that someone subjects you to. Should life really be about expending it in the pursuit of overcoming your weaknesses?

I cannot run. I have wanted to run for as long as I can remember. I am 35 years 110 kgs (236 lbs) 6 feet and an inch tall. I can walk for long distances (a 10K walk is not a problem), but I can’t run for more than 100 meters at a time. Last week I started the C25K running program and I like it so far.

I have always wanted to learn programming. Even now my top favourites on my to-learn list are: Javascript, AngularJS, Python and others in that order. And then out of nowhere I have started pursuing SQL. I don’t know why, but it occurred to me that knowing SQL is an important step in learning to build apps and understand data. And so began my search and quest to learn SQL.

We are a product of our greed and fears - says Michael E Gerber in his book the E-Myth Manager. I believe that while our greed motivates us to take action, our fears literally push us to action (or inaction). Fears are what hold us back from doing things that we want to do or they cause us to run from things that we should stand and face.

A tutorial is a set of instructions. And there are many ways to deliver this set of instructions to those who need them.

Why is a tutorial required?

Video Tutorials are an integral part of our mobile world. It is also the most easy to learn something new. Many businesses have extensive libraries of How-To videos to help their customers learn more about the products they sell. Video is here to stay.

Yesterday, I attended a workshop about User Centered Design and Documentation organized by the Bangalore STC India Chapter and Microfocus/Novell. Here is a summary of the workshop.

I am not an assertive person, but I want to be one. I want to be confident, sure of myself, be able to say to others what I want to say. This is something that I have always wanted from the time I discovered that I am not very good at saying what I want to say in front of others.

I have been thinking of moving my blog which is currently a wordpress site to a static site.

My Dear Service Designer,

A service project can go wrong in many ways. A well thought out process can help keep service projects in check and can help a business generate repeatable success. Read on to know how a process can make or break your service project success.

We people are driven by emotions. We are slaves to our emotions. We do what we do because of how that doing makes us feel. Buying stuff we need is also heavily driven by what emotions we feel when buying that stuff. No matter how much we like to think that we are rational beings, we make buying decisions with our heart and then rationalize those decisions with logic as an after thought.

A friend of mine recently started an clothing and apparel store. That got me thinking about how she can go about using the internet to increase foot falls to her store. And not just increase the foot falls, provide new ways for the potential customers to engage with her business.

What are the ways that a team can come together after the completion of a project and discuss what went wrong and what went great? What are the positive ways of discussing the smooth and the hairy parts of the project? How do you discuss the components of a project that went wrong without the discussion sounding like a blame throwing match?

If I were a budding Movie Director trying to get a foothold in the industry, how would I go about making my digital presence felt. What would I do build my reputation online, when no one knows and no one will give me a chance to show that I really can do.

When you are promoting a product, one of the questions that you want to ask anyone that you meet is, “Would Your Buy This Product?”. This is one of the most useless questions to ask. Read on to know why this is such a poor question and how you should go about forming questions to ask your potential customers.

Writing your first blog post can be daunting task. You may even encounter a serious case of writer’s block. In this video I talk about the four stages of writing that can be used to write your first blog post. These four stages of writing take you through the process step by step and by the time you are done with the process, your blog post will be ready for publishing on your blog.

Overloaded technical writers are not uncommon. In fact it is more common to see overloaded technical writers than otherwise. There many reasons for this but one of the primary reasons for this could be that usually for tens or hundreds of developers in an organization there are only a few technical writers. And so documentation requests from multiple sources start coming to the technical writers.

Technical Writers are primarily writers and writing is their profession. The source of what technical writers write usually comes from experts who are the intellectual owners of a product or a process. What this means is that technical writers must practice and constantly improve the skill of gathering technical information and processes flows from the subject matter experts. This article talks in brief of some of the aspects of gathering information.

There are ample number of cases where Project Managers do not have the luxury of hiring experience technical writers. Due to various reasons it may be only possible to hire fresh graduates or interns for technical writing assignments.

Almost all companies that hire technical writers conduct some kind of test before considering to hire the writer. The test could involve creating a technical writing sample. Here are some of my thoughts on why it is important to do proper evaluation before hiring a technical writer for a position.

What should a movie director convey through his website? Why should the director have a website in the first place? What does a visitor to the website want to get out of it? In this article I explore some thoughts around creating a website for a film maker. I am going to be referring to this hypothetical movie director throughout this article, so to make things easy for me, I am going to call the movie director by the name Surya.

The job of a HR professional / recruiter is often tough. If the company that the HR is recruiting for is a popular one, then there will always be a lot of job seekers wishing to work for that company and very few jobs that are open in comparison. This means that the HR professional needs to sift through a ton of resumes and pick those that shine among the huge stack. I asked a few HR professionals what do they look for in resumes to help them decide to either toss the resume or call the candidate.

My Resume Sucks and I Hate It

Did you even know that there was something called “Levels of Technical Authoring”? Well there is. How you serve the technical content needs of your customers defines your level of technical authoring. Nobody is giving any awards (at least not right now) to those who are at higher levels of technical authoring but their customers surely have reasons to award them with repeat business or love. Read on to know more about Levels of Technical Authoring.

An interesting illustration of why it is important to use systems thinking in solving problems.

If you want to embed a HTML5 Video in a DITA topic for the Webhelp transformation when using oXygenXML Editor, the steps below might be useful to you.

As is the case with any kind of project, business managers want to know up front, how long a technical writing project will take before it can be called complete. What kind of resources are required for completing the technical writing project. In service organisations this desire to know the effort required becomes really strong. Let us look at some of the factors that need to be considered while coming up with an effort estimate.

Modifying the default footer that oXygen XML Editor writes out to the DITA Webhelp transformation is done through a parameter called WEBHELP_FOOTER_FILE. The steps below describes the process to modify the footer.

Going from using a software like MS Word to using DITA for documentation is somewhat like going from manually machining a metal rod on a lathe to programmatic machining using a CNC machine. DITA lets you incorporate intelligence into your documentation. Let’s look at the first stage of the planning that needs to be done to adopt DITA.

One of my first assignments in my new job was to convert the existing user manuals that were created using MS Word to a more modern documentation framework. The company wide decision was to move to DITA. In this article I will write about how I converted a MS Word user manual to DITA.

Hindsight is always perfect. I can tell you now, that I should have decided to scale down my business much earlier than when I actually did. I should have pursued more more lucrative business models than trying to stick to the one that was not working for me. Finding paying customers should have been my number one priority.