January 08, 2026

Kate sounds off on self-documentation

30 minutes

In this solo episode, I share my latest content updates progress (spoiler: I finished my project! 🎉). I also share the new daily check-in Google Form I’m trying, inspired by Kate Pond’s interview (S3:E24), as well as some general thoughts on the power of self-documentation and a call for more intermittent or unofficial tech writing guests.

I finally finished my project to update the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base to align with major navigation and UI changes we rolled out in December 2024! 🎉 I updated and archived a ton of articles, completed a tags audit, overhauled our internal guidance on using tags, and submitted a pull request to the Microsoft Entra docs to update their KnowledgeOwl SSO docs. Along the way, I had to trim my scope and toss a lot of additional ideas or changes into a separate backlog list. Now that I’ve completed the project, I’m hoping to work through that separate backlog list as time permits.

I used Kate Pond’s blog post about her daily check-ins as a strawman to create my own daily check-in Google Form for my work and I share the questions I’m using. I’ll report back on my usage of it in my next solo episode.

I also share a previously unreleased clip from Kate Pond’s interview in which I describe a form of self-documentation I’ve used in my personal life to manage a chronic illness, many of the benefits to using self-documentation in this way, and some tips for trying it out yourself. I reflect on Kate Pond’s career journey and share what I see as some of the key steps in that journey that others might be able to replicate.

I close the episode by noting that I’m really trying to include more unofficial or intermittent tech writers like Kate Pond, so if you or someone you know has written documentation without calling yourself a tech writer, please come on the show! Feel free to use our guest suggestions form.

In this episode: