As developers, we write a lot more than just code. We write commit messages; we review our colleagues’ code; we email collaborators; we tweet our hottest takes.
Good written communication can make your systems easier to use and maintain, encourage your colleagues to be more receptive to your suggestions, and make you more popular on the internet. I’ll share some practical ways to communicate more effectively, and some less practical theory about how people and language work.
This talk is about helping developers to communicate effectively with writing, focused on the type of writing that we use to communicate with colleagues and collaborators, like commit messages, Slack messages, emails, and code reviews.
We’ll do a review of the types of communication that we tend to write on a day-to-day basis, and will use those as examples to illustrate techniques and strategies to write more effectively. I’ll use some ideas from discourse theory and draw some parallels between good writing and good code.
Watch 'Writing To Be Understood' on PyCon AU's YouTube account
Merrin Macleod
DjangoCon AU Invited Speaker
@merxplat
Merrin Macleod, a New Zealand-based software developer, is the author of many critically-acclaimed emails. She is an active part of the technology community in New Zealand and Australia, having started the Kiwi Ruby conference and Rails Girls New Zealand, as well as coaching at Django Girls in Wellington. In the last year she’s been a fellow with Code for Australia in the Victorian Government, and is now working in the public service in New Zealand.
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