Hi, I'm Amruta and I'm back with another tech writing video.
Today, I want to discuss how to build a tech writing portfolio with open source projects.
I have seen several discussions online about tech writing portfolios
and the most common questions asked in these discussions are
What documents do I include in my portfolio?
How do I build a portfolio with no experience
And writers with experience might have the problem
that all their work documents are behind a company paywall and cannot be shared publicly.
And the most common answer to all these questions is
Contribute to open source projects
and I completely agree with the recommendation.
I use GitHub for most of my open source contributions
and so my GitHub profile serves as my tech writing portfolio.
My GitHub profile is publicly accessible. So anybody can go and look at the documents that I work on.
It also helps me demonstrate my flexibility and proficiency with writing tools
my writing process
and also my collaborative skills.
In this video,  I want to show you my GitHub profile
so that you can have an idea of what an open source portfolio looks like
and then you can work on your own portfolio.
But before we look at my GitHub profile,
you need to know what is open source software and the basic GitHub workflow.
So if you're not familiar with either of those things, I will leave my favorite resources in the description box below
Also disclaimer: GitHub is not the only open source platform out there.
But it's the most common one and it's the one that I am most familiar with. So that's what I'm going to share.
Okay, Let's look at my portfolio.
This is what my GitHub profile looks like.
As you might know I work as a Senior Tech Writer at an open source company here in New York
And I also contribute to other open source projects when I can
These are the four repositories that I work the most in
CockroachDB Docs is the repository that I use at work. That is my work repository.
Write the Docs is the repository that I updated last year.
The Hydra ecosystem org repository is something that I'm working on for Google Season of Docs.
Cover letter snippets is a project I worked on last month.
You can also see the number of contributions I made last year.
My GitHub profile has a public record of all my documentation activity.
So that proves my first point: My GitHub profile acts as my tech writing portfolio
and it is publicly accessible to all.
My profile also helps me demonstrate my flexibility and proficiency with tech writing tools.
For example while working on the CockroachDb docs, I use Markdown and Jekyll
But for the Write the Docs project, I had to use reStructuredText.
Okay, let's go into the CockroachDB repository so I can show you my actual documents.
Okay, let's look for my documents
So these are all the documents that I have written since I joined Cockroach Labs
As you can see, I've worked 112 projects
So this list gives you an idea of the type of documents that I can write.
So you will see a lot of UI updates.
I also work on the security docs so encryption, authentication, authorization,
Audit logging, all of that. So you'll see a lot of security doc updates.
And I also help out with the SQL docs. So you will see a few SQL docs, um,  in there.
So this list gives you an idea of the range of documentation I can work on.
Now let's look at one doc project in detail.
Let's look at the security overview docs.
This is another thing that I like about the GitHub profile
It shows you exactly the changes that I made in a document
For example, if you see in this project it shows you that I updated 86 files
But I did not create 86 brand-new files from scratch. As you can see the first file has very minor updates
It's literally just link updates. But if you scroll down...
You will see a brand new document that I added
And this was a new document
I did rework some of the existing content, but most of all was pretty new
This brings me to my third point: my GitHub profile helps me demonstrate my actual tech writing skills
Let's look at the published document to give you a better idea.
So this is the published project
and this is the document that I added.
So if I was applying for jobs,
I would send a link to this published document as well as my GitHub project
so that the person evaluating my writing skills
can have an idea of what the published document would look like and how I got to that stage.
They can also see my Markdown skills and my structuring skills and my formatting skills and my language usage
Finally, we are at a fourth point: My GitHub profile helps me demonstrate my collaborative skills.
For example if we go back to the conversation
This is what I chose to include for my reviewers.
So I included a summary of changes, because I had updated 86 files
I didn't want my reviewers to click through each of them to figure out what they need to review
and what they can ignore, so I included a summary of changes.
I also included a link to the original issue
Then I also included my thought process behind the proposed information architecture
Because this project involved creating new content and also restructuring existing content
so I wanted to give them an idea of how I was planning to go about it.
And then I had a specific review request for my reviewers
So that they would know what kind of feedback I was initially expecting from them
And then once we were past that feedback, we did a very detailed review.
So with that I assigned the pull request to my reviewers and then my product manager gave me very detailed feedback.
I worked on the feedback and replied to his comments.
Then I assigned the PR to the engineers, so this is the engineering feedback
This is our CTO's feedback
This is my manager's feedback. I worked on it and again replied to his comments.
And I kept on iterating on the document
Till we finally reached a solution that all of us were happy and comfortable with.
So that's my tech writing portfolio.
I hope this video was helpful.
I am aware of the fact that I am very lucky to work at an open source organization.
But what if you don't work at an open source organization?
How would you go about finding and choosing an open source project to contribute to?
That's the question we will tackle in the next video.
So in the next video I want to share my process of
finding and choosing an open source project to contribute to.
If you think that would be interesting, subscribe to my channel and hit the bell icon
So you will be notified when the video is up.
I'll see you then. Until then, Happy writing!
