Welcome
I am a technical communicator with a love of explaining technical concepts in documentation, blog posts, videos, books and more.
I currently work for Chronosphere and have a small technical writing agency.
I am a podcaster, video maker, writer of interactive fiction, and games. This website is a home for all my blog posts, podcasts, newsletters and creative projects.
Need advice for your documentation project? Sign up for my office hours.
Sign up for my newsletter
Sign up for my Chinchilla Squeaks newsletter for a mostly weekly roundup of technology, gaming, history, language and general geekery.
Hands on - Creating amazing documentation with Archbee.mp4
Archbee joins the plethora of tools promising to help you build cohesive, well integrated, and varied developer documentation. It includes markdown, API references, commenting, mermaid support, and much more. Too good to be true or just what youāre looking for? I take a look!
The Solo Adventurer - I'm Bored, Let's Explore (Ruins)
A game about discovering the past with a sibling. And skeletons. Yes.
Hands on - Private browsing with DuckDuckGo for macOS
Iāve used DuckDuckGo as a search engine for a while, but the company also has mobile browsers Iāve been experimenting with, and now announced a browser for macOS in beta that isnāt just another Chromium browser. I take a look and see why I might use it instead of Safari.
Hands on - Switching from Heroku to Vercel
In this hands on I see whatās involved in switching a small hobby coding project from hosted with Heroku to Vercel.
Twedit
In this issue I cover the far-reaching nuances of privacy, switching from Google, Twitter breaks itself, and D&D goes beyond! š²
Hands on - Headless CMS in VSCode with Front Matter
Front Matter is a CMS that runs within Visual Studio Code. It gives you the power and control of a full-blown CMS while also providing you the flexibility and speed of the static site generator of your choice. Wow!? I take a lookā¦
Hardening JavaScript with Kris Kowal
In this episode I speak with Kris Kowal, a software engineer at Agoric. We discuss the origins of securing code, the future of Javascript, and, Chinchillas.
Creative writing with JetBrains Grazie
I looked at using Grazie for technical copy, tried creative writing with GitHub Copilot, and people asked me to try the same with Grazieā¦ So here we go, another live writing session with an AI assistant! What will we concoct together?
The Solo Adventurer - Narrative Scripting with inky
As a long-term technical writer I find creating games with structured text works for my brain. How does Inky and its various plugins allow me to create games? How does it compare to other tools Iāve looked at such as Twine and Expeditios? I take a look!
Exodus
Some serious subjects for this issue, from forced human migrations, to what engineers can do about sustainability. Sometimes thatās whatās needed.
Hands on - Open Source video Editing with kdenlive
Iām currently looking at alternatives to Adobe Premiere and I thought why not try the open source kdenlive and see how it compares to a plethora of proprietary, expensive editors.
Internet 3 point uh oh
In this episode I cover risks to the internet from various sources, technology for cyber defence, and more.
The Solo Adventurer - Create D&D content with The Homebrewery
The Homebrewery is a tool for making authentic looking D&D content using Markdown, merging two of my favourite thingsā¦ Too good to be true? Letās see!