Once Upon a Time There Were... Docs
summary
A technical writer turns OpenTelemetry into a children's book that explains core concepts with metaphors and illustrations, drafts under 1,000 words in a week, hires Naomi J Carroll for art, and gets Splunk to sponsor production; the team spends four months and about 150 emails to finish a PDF released without a gate. The experiment proves storytelling surfaces hard details, generates enthusiastic engineer feedback, and becomes a learning path toward the product center rather than a marketing stunt.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:14What is OpenTelemetry
- 7:23Product truth in docs
- 10:16Storytelling for tech
- 14:15Children’s book about OpenTelemetry
- 18:08Book and docs ingredients
- 23:23Illustrations bring story
- 26:58Publishing and teamwork
- 27:42Key learnings
- 31:34Experimentation and fun
- 32:38Q&A
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