Re: Anyone have a programmer in the doc group?

["Eric J. Ray" <ejray -at- RAYCOMM -dot- COM>]

> We had a person from Autodesk present at our STC meeting a couple of months
> back (she was part of a panel of indexers). She told us that Autodesk had a
> "handyman" kind of programmer on the documentation staff. This person would
> write scripts, applications, and stuff to make the writers' lives easier. I

That's not particularly unusual--some kind of a resident geek/tools person
makes everyone's job easier. That person is often the same as the local
Word/Frame/OS maven.

> How many out there have a programmer on the documentation staff? Or someone at
> their disposal when they need something like a script? How about the writers
> who can also program: are you allowed to write scripts/applets/programs on
> company time? How big are the companies that have this luxury (or what seems
> like a luxury)?

How's it a luxury? I'm "allowed" (read, expected and encouraged) to use
everything at my disposal to be more effective, useful, and productive.
If that means writing scripts to handle the tedious stuff, good for me.
Frankly, the distinction you're making confuses me--is programming just
so much fun that you couldn't possibly be paid for it?

> For the record, I have written applications for my work, but in my own time.

On your own time? Why?

> on company time, but just didn't feel quite right about it. If I know that
> there are other companies out there who have writers working on this kind of
> stuff, or who have programmers on the documentation staff, then it might be
> easier for me to justify to myself and the management! :-)

Good grief! You'd have to _justify_ writing code to make your work more
productive? How about macros? Is there a difference? I don't hesitate
to write scripts and call it work (most recently, a hack to seek out
HTML documents within a folder and subfolders, dump
all HTML documents to temporary text files and count the words in them,
total all words counts for all documents in all folders, then display
the result) Took far less than an hour to write for a co-worker (would
have been less than 15 minutes if I'd not been brain-dead) and saved
easily as much time--if not now, then when it gets reused.

It seems that, particularly for those of us moving further into
variants of online information and those attempting single-sourcing,
the lines between programming and "writing" are pretty blurry, and
get blurrier the harder you work.

Just my two cents,
Eric


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