Jeff Cross didn't plan to become a technical writer. He started a computer science degree, dropped out, spent a year trying to make it as a fiction writer, went back for a philosophy degree, considered academia, and then — almost by accident — realized that technical writing was the thing that made all of it make sense.
Now Senior Manager of Technical Writing at Arctic Wolf, Jeff has spent years doing some of the most complex content work in the industry: documenting third-party security integrations he has no direct access to, managing a full DITA migration while keeping up with release cycles, and pulling off a content carve-out from a corporate acquisition with translated content in three languages and a hard deadline.
In this episode, Jeff and Patrick talk about what it really means to do great documentation work, and why the hardest parts rarely show up in a job description.
They cover:
- Why the security space takes documentation seriously in ways other industries don't
- What happened when a product rename turned "a" into "an" across thousands of content files
- How AI helped a small team execute a DITA-to-DITA migration without outside help
- The checkbox doc that nobody wanted to write — and that way more people read than expected
- Why technical writing is less like writing and more like investigative journalism
Plus: Patrick discovers mid-conversation that Jeff was the person who fixed the BlackBerry email signature problem that drove him personally crazy for a year.
