May 2010 – Project Green A to Z

Partial view of the Sierra Heights roofs. The block to the north has four houses with solar panels.

As I stood on the roof of our condo complex on a recent sunny day, I could see the roofs of several blocks to the north and east of our three buildings. We live in one of the sunnier areas in San Francisco, so perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me to see four roofs with solar panels on one block, three on another, and three on the third. But San Francisco is unusual this way; according to the representative from a Fremont-based solar company who stood with me on the roof, more people in San Francisco than in Fremont choose solar, though Fremont is sunnier. Continue reading “Condoizing solar, part 1: getting started” →

In the documentation department at Macromedia, and then Adobe, we struggled with the increasing complexity of writer tasks. Writers were being asked to handle more technical details, and their jobs began to include tasks previously relegated to production experts. As authoring tools became more powerful and complex, there were more and more things to remember to do — and often, the omission of a very simple task could have serious consequences. One document made it into a Japanese help system with an entire section in English, because it hadn’t been tagged correctly and therefore never got to Localization to be translated. And that’s just one small example. Continue reading “The humble checklist” →