About

Equipping students, writers, and other knowledge workers with tools of power and productivity

Docwright

As an early 20th–century author on craftsmanship said about wheelwrights, they “were friends, as only a craftsman can be, with timber and iron. The grain of wood told secrets to them” (George Stuart, Wheelwright’s Shop, 1923). I am a technical writer, a documentation engineer if you will, an aspiring docwright. I have 10+ years of experience in tech startups. I write about complex topics for people outside the field. Some of the guides here explain invaluable concepts I’ve learnt along the way, made “as simple as possible, but not simpler” (a paraphrase of Albert Einstein). You’ll find in here topics directly or indirectly related to writing, mostly the latter: things I wish I’d known before I started my career.

Motivation

The core problem

Think of a book that changed your mind: not the one you enjoyed, but one that moved you to disavow a position you once held. Now find your notes on it: not the book, the notes, the objection you scrawled in the margin, the passage you copied out, the thought you had and scribbled at dawn’s first light. Good if you found them. Most do not even take notes. And many who do, for various reasons, cannot find them when needed. A lot of labour was wasted. And that, essentially, is what this site attempts to address, by helping people with tools that increase their productivity and security.

If you are going to spend years learning (reading, studying, writing, researching, making notes, developing ideas, cultivating a body of work, a garden, if you will), you need tools, weapons even, to keep it. What’s the point of building something you cannot keep and, more importantly, pass down to your children?

With great power comes great responsibility

Our fathers had nothing like the tools now available to us for free. Yet very few ever learn to own the ground their intellectual life stands on. Files live in somebody else’s cloud. Notes are scattered across notebooks, PDFs, Word documents, LLM platforms, browser tabs, and forgotten folders. Research is spread across a dozen applications that do not speak to each other. Private material sits on someone else’s servers, under someone else’s terms. Backups are thin, untested, or absent. Identity rests on passwords held by companies. And publishing waits on someone else’s permission. But we’re in the 21st century, and you have no excuse. It’s never been easier to be a literary person, and it’s never been easier to spin up a blog or online book and share with others what you’ve learnt, all for free.

Bridging the gap

So many students and successful writers have no clue about the tools in the tech world that significantly boost productivity and privacy. Such tools have been around for a while, but often the documentation to bridge the gap between the developers and the laymen is lacking, or it is written hurriedly by developers for developers.

Often, all that is needed is for information to be brought to light. Then there are times when what is needed is for things to be said more clearly; “everything that can be said can be said clearly” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.116). Other times, and more often than not, what is needed is for information to be arranged in the order of importance. As finite creatures, there’s only so much time we have. And when you get down to it, there’s really not a lot one needs to know to complete a task, achieve a goal, or attain significant success. Put first things first and second things are thrown in; put second things first and you lose both first and second things, as C. S. Lewis argued in a 1951 letter.

In short, many problems can be solved by simply bringing the truth to light, expressing it more clearly, and ordering it more rightly. Enter docwrights. Bridging the gap between subject-matter experts and the rest of us is essentially what technical writers, or writers in general, concern themselves with: crafting sentences and presenting them rightly and tastefully, to help themselves and others get things done and make the world a better place.

Hopefully Docwright becomes a good example of how to document things.

The tools are not the garden

The goal is not to become a sysadmin. It’s not to collect technical skills so you can show off on your résumé. The goal is wisdom, understanding, a life worth living, maybe passing an inheritance to the next generation. As you pursue those goals, Docwright teaches you about tools that will increase your productivity and power, yet the tools are not the garden.

A request

I’m not a dev, at least not yet. All the code here is written with Anthropic’s Opus or Fable models. My coding skills is illustrated in the video below.

So, dear devs and security experts, could you please help us laymen out: if you spot a bug or a bad idea in any script, open an issue or send a fix.

“We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.” (David Clark, IETF, July 1992)

Contact

You can write to me at jake.s47@atomicmail.io.