[Author Prev][Author Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
[Author Index (this month)][Thread Index (this month)][Top of Archive]

RE: Quality of source material from Development

Subject: RE: Quality of source material from Development
From: Martha J Davidson <editrix -at- nemasys -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 10:43:46 -0800

At 07:16 AM 12/14/2001 -0700, "Eric J. Ray wrote:

Whew. I was afraid I'd have to write all this up, but
was saved the trouble:

Thanks, Eric. When I saw the elegance of Andrew's
reduction of a complex system to its essential parts,
I wanted to post something similar to what you wrote.

Eric quoted Andrew Plato's summary:
> SQL Server and Oracle are the same base technology they just have
> different bells and whistles. Lump them together. WinCE and WinNT - same
> story, different API. This is the OS. Radio waves: just a network
> transport layer. C/Pascal: Who cares what its coded in. What does it do?
> What goes in, what comes out? What it this products reason for existing in
> the universe?
>
> Basically its a big client/server problem Salan. People tap stuff into a
> PDA, it authenticates against some server somewhere, yanks data out of a
> database (that means somewhere there are queries and stored procs), feeds
> it back to the PDA and displays the information in some client app.
>
> So you've got installation issues, got some database transport issues,
> network connectivity, probably some reports, some data munging...basic
> client/server application.

And that's your 100 word course in _technical_ technical writing.

You reminded me of something that happened to me on a contract
several years ago. In learning about an application I would be documenting,
one of the engineers told me about this menu, that dialog box, and so forth.

I stopped him, and said, "so it's really a GUI-based front end to a
relational database?" He thought for a second, and replied, "yeah,
I guess that's right." I was surprised that he sounded surprised, and
realized that none of the other technical writers he'd worked with
had been able to reduce to system to its essential shape in that way.
The fact that the data was about something I didn't understand mattered
less than the fact that I'd seen that it really was about getting data in and
out of a database and presenting it so that the users would be able to see
the current values and change them.

Thanks Andrew and Eric for your posts. It's good to see other people
describe my own thought process so clearly.

martha



--
Martha Jane {Kolman | Davidson}
Dances With Words
mailto:editrix -at- nemasys -dot- com

"We must become the change we want to see in the world."
--Gandhi


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Collect Royalties, Not Rejection Letters! Tell us your rejection story when you submit your manuscript to iUniverse Nov. 6 -Dec. 15 and get five free copies of your book. What are you waiting for? http://www.iuniverse.com/media/techwr

Have you looked at the new content on TECHWR-L lately?
See http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ and check it out.

---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as: archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.

Follow-Ups:

References:
RE: Quality of source material from Development: From: Andrew Plato
RE: Quality of source material from Development: From: Eric J. Ray

Previous by Author: being seen
Next by Author: Sideheads in WORD documents
Previous by Thread: RE: Quality of source material from Development
Next by Thread: Re: Quality of source material from Development

[Top of Archive] | [Author Index (this month)] | [Thread Index (this month)]

What this post helpful? Share it with friends and colleagues:

Sponsored Ads