23: Ep. 23 | Mastering Storytelling in Tech

Bethany (00:00) Welcome to the Overcommitted Podcast, where we discuss our code commits, our personal commitments, and some stuff in between. I’m your host this week, Bethany. Join by…

Erika (00:08) Erica.

Brittany Ellich (00:10) Brittany.

Bethany (00:11) We are software engineers who initially met as a new hire group at GitHub and found a common interest in continuous learning and building interesting projects. We continue to meet to share our learning experiences and discuss our lives as developers. Whether you’re pushing code or taking on new challenges, we’re happy you’re listening. So this week, I thought we’d talk about storytelling and tech.

Talking about technical topics doesn’t need to be boring. And there’s actually a real skill involved in making technical concepts interesting and relatable to your audience. Could happen with presentations, documentation, even code or like PRs. I’ve learned a lot about communicating technically over the years. And I really admire both of you for your ability to do the same. So I’m really excited to dive into this with you all. So first, just wanted to

kind of talk overview, like when you think about great presentations or documentation and compare them with maybe not so great ones, ⁓ what are the biggest differences to you all?

Erika (01:05) thing that comes to mind for me is visual storytelling. I’ve seen some documentation, the Astro documentation comes to mind, where it’s like very visually appealing and a little like going back to the Game of Vacation episode where like it’s like it’s very leveled. Like you you can see progress as you go through the documentation.

It’s sort of a challenge. And so the story is like, your understanding of this information. So I think in a world online where so much is visual, really having that like, yeah.

nice looking visuals, icons, people use emojis and gifs a lot, which is helpful in kind of bringing some levity. then, yeah, like having an arc of sort of like beginning, middle and end of where you’re trying to go. I’ve also found to be more engaging than the flat wall of text.

Brittany Ellich (02:13) I definitely agree with visualization being really important for telling a story. think that a wall of text is very, very hard to get through. think the other thing that sticks out to me is approachability. I can’t tell you how many things, especially early in my career, that I started reading like the front page of the docs and they would start going into how like this is an expressive language that uses, you know, that’s, I can’t even think of all of the different words now, but like there’s a lot of word terms that we use within software.

development that are just not approachable at all to folks that are very, very new. And those are probably the ones that are going to be reading the front page of your docs anyway. Most developers are going to just jump to the getting started in the like NPM start part anyway. So making sure that it’s something that’s approachable and keeping your audience in mind, I feel like is really important and it’s really easy to tell when people are doing that and when they’re not.

Erika (03:04) Yeah, I think the other thing that I find missing more often than not is a question to the answer, why do I care? And like, any software you’re building is meant to solve a problem, but like, I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone to a site or documentation for a piece of software.

and they assume that you already know what problem you’re trying to solve by coming to this solution. It’s like, no, no, you need to tell me, like, why would I choose this over something else? And like, what specifically is the problem that I’m addressing here?

Bethany (03:37) I completely agree. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot from a not just documentation perspective, but a presentation perspective. I’m preparing for a lightning talk at GopherCon next week. it’s part of the lightning talk. So it’s just a big segment of talks that people are listening to. So I’ve got to kind of solve why people should care about what I’m talking about.

capture their attention. And I think there’s not that many examples of just how to do that effectively, you know? And I think with presentations at work or like out of meetup, that’s also important. So many work presentations, I honestly just like zone out because it’s totally not meeting me where I am. It’s not explaining or conveying topics or in a way that

a lot of the audience can understand. it’s just like, whoosh. But that’s how you get your…

Erika (04:30) Side note.

Oh, I was gonna say side note. What are you talking about?

Bethany (04:34) I’m so glad you asked. Hi, my talk is called, Not Your Parent’s Editor, A Gopher’s Guide to NeoVim. So yes, I’m so excited. I love being able to talk about tooling and stuff. this is my dream. And I think I applied for it for a regular talk, but I think the lightning talk is a lot better of a format for this because it’s kind of like a…

Erika (04:41) That is so you. ⁓

Bethany (04:57) short and sweet thing and I can kind of maybe take people by surprise and be like, hey, use it. But I’m super excited. ⁓

Erika (05:04) Well, I feel like I’m

your audience member who will go to your talk, who like has tried them multiple times and can’t get past the hump of like, why like, why would I switch over now? Yeah. ⁓

Bethany (05:17) Yeah.

I love that and I’m

gonna take a note for it. I’ve already written the presentation, but, ⁓

Erika (05:24) you

Bethany (05:25) Sorry about my keyboard. These are the Wano Sakura keys, the way, or switches, by the way. They are very nice, but very loud. ⁓

Erika (05:33) I think that’s

Brittany Ellich (05:33) They

Erika (05:33) another

Brittany Ellich (05:33) sound really nice.

Erika (05:33) lightning talk that Bethany could go.

Bethany (05:35) ⁓ But yes, I think the why is so important. It’s like, well, why should you care? But I’m kind of starting with a bit of self-deprecation. Like, I chose them to look cool or something like that. So I’m hoping that grabs people’s attention.

Erika (05:36) you

Thank

Yeah, I’ve heard, I’ve heard people do this like pretty well in like, ⁓ like imagine yourself in this situation and like, you know, you’re, you’re like banging your, like, obviously I don’t know the reason for them. I don’t know your reasons for them as well. ⁓ but like, I imagine you could frame it if you, since we’re talking about this, like you could frame it as like, you know, you’re in this situation, like you’re looking for this, like this is your,

Bethany (06:07) cool. ⁓

Erika (06:19) Like, this is your solution. you know, and like you said, like put, put people in the mindset of where you want them to start and where you want them to go.

Bethany (06:29) Yeah, I love that. That’s a really great framing, especially since a lot of people just are like, well, VS Code has everything I need. Why would I switch? And it’s valid. I don’t even know that I’m quite selling that Vim is better than VS Code. It’s better for me than VS Code, but that’s because it’s a personal choice, a personal tool. It does the right thing. But I think I just want people to give it a chance or not think of it as this archaic.

thing that is from the past and it’s actually evolved in a really cool way to be a actual good editor in 2025. just really excited, but yeah.

Brittany Ellich (07:06) I know you said that you’re starting with some self-deprecation, which is a classic. But I think that also gives a really good point about what’s important to start storytelling, and especially for tech presentations that I’ve seen, having a good hook, I feel like, is really important at the beginning, especially for a lightning talk when somebody’s sitting there listening to more, a bunch of lightning talks over and over, having a hook that’s not just, hi, my name is Bethany, and this is the thing that I am presenting.

Bethany (07:18) you

Brittany Ellich (07:32) is super important. One thing that I’ve been doing that I feel like has been really helpful for me is like I just jump immediately into like some visualizations and talking about a thing using some of like the illustrations and stuff that I do and then like a few minutes in then I’m like, hi I’m Brittany I’m talking to you about this and then move on. ⁓

Bethany (07:32) Yeah.

Ooh, yeah, you did that in

your GoFundMe presentation. I loved that. That was great.

Brittany Ellich (07:56) Yeah,

I got a lot of good feedback about that. And I feel like it helps because there’s so many conversations where people are like, or presentations where people are like, hi, I am this. And this is why you should listen me because I’ve worked at this many places. And these are the things that I like to do. my brain turns off immediately before they even get into their presentation.

Erika (08:14) Yeah, it can almost be arbitrary too. Like I’ve, I have not listened to a ton of Steve Jobs talks, but I’ve heard people talk about Steve Jobs talks and like how good he was at this of engaging people in the product and like building a story around Apple. And like some of the, like some of the quotes I’ve heard are like, like not even tech related, right? They’re like.

you know, a story about a person in life and like, you know, so and so whatever doing something. And it’s like, then in comes Apple. It’s like, okay, they’re actually not related, but like, he was engaging enough for like, now I’m listening to you. And like, now I’m interested enough in what you’re saying that like, I’ll continue to hear you out on what might be like, more sales pitchy or more boring.

Bethany (08:59) Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s like a superpower that some people have to get people to listen to your ideas and your thoughts. it’s important to, a lot of us don’t just have natural titles that make people automatically want to listen to you or want to hear what you’re saying. So you have to make sure to come in and really grab that attention and also convey like what you have in the ideas you have in your head in a way that other people.

understand and can engage with. And I love that relation to Steve Jobs, because he was just an incredible storyteller. He was great at crafting this narrative where the iPhone saves the world or you need an iPhone. Like, he had to basically sell people on needing a device that they previously did not have or depend on and why it would be valuable. So yeah, really, really good stuff.

Erika (09:51) Yeah, and I think an important element there that you kind of touched on is like the emotional side, which feels completely divergent from technical speeches or technical talks. And I think like, we don’t always reach for that because like, well, why is it important? Like, why is it important how this makes me feel or, know? Yeah, but like,

Meh, we’re humans, like, we do need some of that, some of that consideration. So, not unlike a, you know, like I think it can be to like a degree where it can be manipulative. So like, don’t go that far, but like, you know, a little, a little bit can can go a long way, I think.

Bethany (10:31) Yeah. And I think it does go the other direction, though. Like we were talking about documentation. In your documentation, people are probably looking for a specific thing. And you should know, or at least understand what that is. It’s likely not emotional connection if they’re looking at technical documentation. you’ve got to either, if you’re an open source package, tell people why they even want this. What does it do? What are its benefits? And rattle those off.

And if it’s people searching for documentation, making sure that’s like front and center and available and easy to get access.

But it’s interesting how the medium really affects what you’re going for. If it’s a talk, if it’s a business presentation, if it’s an availability review, I know that’s always been a totally different set of can of worms, I guess.

Erika (11:15) Yeah, yeah, I think the other elements that kind of come to mind are like characters too, like, yeah, like kind of using personas or like people or different actors in your scenario or storytelling. Yeah, that can be a good tool.

Bethany (11:30) Yeah.

Absolutely. mean, that kind of leads into like stories have characters, conflicts, journeys, resolutions. Is this necessarily the same for a good technical story? Is it always the same or does it map to similar concepts? Or does like a good technical story contain stuff that maybe a traditional story wouldn’t?

Brittany Ellich (11:50) That’s a good question. feel like a lot of these elements that we’re talking about that are useful are just elements of good storytelling in general. So maybe that’s a sign that, you know, that goes hand in hand with how technical stories are told. think another thing that comes to mind that’s really common in storytelling is voice and like the voice that you use throughout the story. And I think it’s really helpful when you are writing something that for a technical audience to also consider, you know, what voice are you portraying? this like a professional thing? Are you trying

to say, present this documentation in a way that you’re also conveying, like we don’t take ourselves that seriously. Please contribute to our open source project. If you see something, what’s wrong? So yeah, I think that technical storytelling and regular storytelling have a lot of crossovers that a lot of people ignore.

when trying to present something that, you know, they might have a stronger argument for their technical story if they actually use some elements of good storytelling in general.

Erika (12:45) Yeah, I think the difference could be that like not all stories need to convey like information. Like technical stories are different from other stories like purely like emotional or like.

you know, I’m thinking like literature, book, whatever, movies, like, and that, like, you don’t need to get any information from, like, a story that is there for your enjoyment. Like, but technical stories do need to, like, convey information and you don’t want to dumb it down because of the way that you’re presenting it. Like, I feel like that’s if there’s, like, a reason why people, like, wouldn’t use storytelling for

these kinds of situations is because like, yeah, like they want to present the information like in its purest form. But like I don’t necessarily think it’s a trade-off you have to make. Like think of Julia Evans and like all her like wizard deans and stuff. And it’s like, I learned so much from those like those cartoons.

I visualize her git zine every time I do any git command. It’s like that is like that is exactly like the point for me is like no actually like the story makes it stick better. Yeah but it’s also like you know I also remember like I mean yeah no secret that I was a musician and like basically the way I studied for any test in high school was like turning into a song like

AP history, the only things I remember to this day are like things that were set to songs, or like my whole SAT vocabulary. Like the only way I remembered any of those was because of like being set to a song. you know, is it like every song is an educational like test study song? No. Is every story a technical story? No, but like, it can, yeah, I can help make it stick, help it make it more engaging. And it it’s the same information.

So yeah, think as long as you keep that, as long as you keep the, what is it, like quality of information, yeah, you can have both.

Brittany Ellich (14:48) Erica, I would love to hear you make some songs about these technical concepts so that I can finally remember how to properly rebase my commits, please.

Bethany (14:57) Yes,

please.

Erika (14:57) Okay,

actually this is a great challenge. Like, as we’re talking about you doing your drawings and stuff, like, yeah, this could be something I could bring to the world.

Brittany Ellich (15:05) Please, please do. That would be amazing.

Bethany (15:07) wizard zines of music. yes please.

Erika (15:10) I can get Isabel to do some backup vocals here pretty soon.

Bethany (15:13) Yay.

that’s amazing. I love all these analogies. mean, Wizard seems to such a such a great representation of of this like storytelling and tech and making these complex, complex things like Julia Evans is pretty low in the stack with what she works on, but she’s able to craft this narrative and bring people like unexplained concepts in a way that

people can understand and that doesn’t make them very like over your head because in a lot of ways, gatekeeping is a common thing in tech and gatekeeping topics ⁓ that may or may not be complicated but making them seem complicated or overly complicated or not willing to help people where they’re at is absolutely a thing that happens in tech and being able to

help people through that is just makes it a better place having more diverse and more thoughts and opinions on things. So that’s a really good point. We’ve talked about this a little, but I’m curious if you all have any more thoughts on how audience really factors into how you present technical details. So if you’re personally preparing a presentation, how do you factor in audience?

What kinds of tools do you use to meet the audience where they’re at?

Brittany Ellich (16:29) I think the biggest thing that I think here is if I’m presenting something that I know is going to be presented to like VPs or like executives or something at that level, typically you want to have something that’s a lot more succinct and to the point and, you know, a single paragraph or a one pager that just kind of gets to the point and doesn’t have a lot of extra fluff and storytelling compared to, you know, if I’m presenting something that I’m going to put on my blog or that I’m going to present in front of

know, a wider audience than I think about, you know, trying to add more to it to make it more memorable.

Erika (17:04) Yeah, I think something I’ve been trying to do more recently is adopt some of this mindset of the audience is gifting you their time and attention and being very conscious of making your space that you’re creating a space that they want to be a part of.

So like, I don’t think it’s dependent on like, who’s in your audience, but like adopting that mindset that like, like you want them to be there. Yeah, like I think sometimes in the past, like, I’ve been like, oh, I have to, like, I have to get this information across. And like, you know, it’s a challenge or like, you know, like they’re gonna think worse of me or have sort of like a negative mindset. And I’ve been trying to like,

adopt more of a positive, inclusive mindset with anyone that I’m talking to in a group. I don’t know if it’s actually made a difference in how I come across, but it’s made presenting a more enjoyable experience for me.

Brittany Ellich (18:04) I think that’s something, something that is kind of related to that too, that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is I feel like I went through this curve of using AI for things like writing and telling these stories, or like I used it to time. was like, this is such a cool tool. And now I’m using it less because I don’t know if it’s just me, but I feel like if I present a bunch of stuff that is only written by AI, doesn’t necessarily respect like people’s time as much as if it’s like written by a human. Like if you just.

say take these bullet points and make it a story to chat GPT and you don’t even take the time necessarily to like read through it and like know that it is like you know your own voice and something that you want to convey and expect other people to spend their time doing that then you know that seems I don’t know kind of disrespectful of people’s time as well I don’t know why that came to mind well

You said that, yeah, taking, know, appreciating the fact that you get people’s attention and not trying to like hog it with things that are like not actually important or interesting or something that you would spend the time working on.

Bethany (19:03) I love that so much. And it reminded me of an article that I was chatting with a friend the other day. She mentioned, and it was saying sending AI slop is an act of war. Because you’re almost wasting people’s time with a lot of it. I think AI is an incredible tool for synthesizing things, searching, understanding things in a voice that makes sense to you. But when information is

pushed to you and it’s AI. It does feel like a waste of time because, Brittany, to your point, people aren’t spending the time to necessarily make sure it’s good or make sure it conveys what they actually want it to. It reminds me, there was this ad for Apple doing something, like Apple’s AI or whatever, and somebody took bullet points. It said, make this a long email, and I made it a long email. They sent the email.

the person on the receiving side took that email, summarized it into bullet points. It was like, what are we doing? We just killed like five trees with that, not that many. But still, like that was a cost to servers, to like the environment just to send this thing that the person was thinking in the first place to another person. I think.

That was a very off topic rant, but I just love that idea of using AI to provide meaningful benefit, but not to replace your value in this or to waste somebody’s time.

Erika (20:27) Yeah, I mean, that is a funny illustration. I think to like take it back to to this idea of like audience to like, I think in that example, it’s like on either end, it’s like you are perceiving what you think the other person wants in sending this as a like paragraph format versus bullet points. But what they actually want is bullet points. So like in those like working relationships to like, I don’t know, like it may be

is worth, like I don’t think about this that often, but it is maybe worth like spending time with people that you work with more frequently to like figure out what the best way to communicate with them is. Like similar to how people are like, I’m gonna customize my, you know, GPT interface to, or like chat interface to like speak in the voice that I want it to. Like I’m gonna give it like.

Southern California colloquialisms or whatever. I don’t know. That’s whatever to me. But I don’t think I’ve thought of that with my colleagues. I think I typically think of how would I want to receive this information instead of, what would make the most sense to them?

Bethany (21:33) Yeah, absolutely. It is interesting how as we go forward with this age of AI and stuff, how it’s becoming more and more clear. What is the value that we’re adding here? What is AI taking over versus what do we still have concrete value in providing? And I think it definitely becomes more and more clear as we go on and probably will continue to as AI gets better or how we reimagine what things…

what work looks like past this, but I’m sure we’ve talked about that at nauseam in other episodes.

Erika (22:04) Well,

and to like, I don’t know, not go too far down this, but like, to make this point, it’s like, AI, as good as it will be, will never replace that human element. Period.

Bethany (22:14) 100%,

yes. Thank you for being clear, yeah.

Brittany Ellich (22:16) Yeah, I feel like that’s.

that’s becoming more and more clear. feel like the more that the more that I use it for sure. think one more thing to you related to audience that I think about quite a lot is the fact that we all work remotely. And so a lot of our interaction with our colleagues is through the stories that we tell and through the documentation that we write and through the way that we, you know, convey information. So I feel like another aspect of that storytelling really is kind of like to speak to other things we’ve talked about in the past is like the personal brand or whatever you are, you might just be

your documentation for other co-workers because you don’t necessarily get a chance to just hang out in you know an informal way. So I feel like taking time to you know consider your audience and then also to make sure that what you put out there is you know is good storytelling or is it like it’s a good you know conveyance of what you know and what you want to share with other people is very important too.

Erika (23:15) It’s true though, actually, I think that’s another vector of communication that we’ve briefly touched on, maybe to draw the line of virtual versus in-person, being a factor in how you communicate. There’s a whole book that I was hearing about that’s how to communicate in a virtual setting.

⁓ Like what kinds of meetings to have, you know, like how to craft your messages, like whether to use video or not, like all these things that are present in a virtual working environment that aren’t in person. So like, yeah, I mean not to like overthink everything. Like I think, you know, it’s, yeah, it’s not.

rocket science necessarily, but to be conscious of that too. you know, when when there’s a screen in front of you, like you might, I think, I think my tendency is like when there’s, yeah, like when I’m behind a video or something, like I have to like amplify my emotions when I’m speaking, because it’s like there’s

know, an element of distance there. So if I want my emotions to come across, I have to be that much more expressive in my voice and my face. Yeah. And same with like written communication, like, I have to be like, like, I’ll use even more imagery, like, yeah, emojis, GIFs to make it exciting. And, and also like,

Yeah, you have the opportunity to make it really clear and concise.

Bethany (24:44) Absolutely. I love that the GitHub onboarding mentioned using emojis a lot and written communication to convey what your tone is. And that’s such a good point too that over a video, you can see facial expressions and hear vocal inflections, but it’s not quite the same as being in person. And you do have to amplify it. I think that’s why Zooms end up being a lot more exhausting than just regular having meetings.

But that’s such a real thing. think also the book we’re reading for our book club looks good to me. It mentions this with PR feedback as well and making sure that your tone is good for giving feedback and something that can be very vulnerable for somebody is putting their code out there for review or vulnerable for you to ask a question about it. So making sure that your tone is not accusatory if it’s saying,

hey, what’s happening here? What are we doing here? And then also using different language like we or the PR rather than why did you do this? Why did you choose to do this? So that you’re not like putting the person on the line. So I think those kinds of things are so important and a lot of people don’t necessarily consider it with written communication, especially as more and more jobs are remote first and communication gets even more important.

Erika (26:04) Yeah, she even describes the PR as the opportunity to tell a story. And yeah, she mentions like the PR description as an opportunity to do that. ⁓ Like labels, your like, yeah, the title of your PR, like every, every element of it, of like, yeah, your code, obviously, like every element can be part of telling that story.

And go back to the beginning of what you’re trying to solve. What’s the beginning, middle, and end? Why are you doing this? How are you doing it? And what’s it going to look like when it gets deployed?

Bethany (26:39) and not just saying, listing a ton of things in a way that people skim past it or don’t read it, but conveying it in a concise way and in a way that resonates with people. Absolutely. ⁓

Erika (26:51) I I

put a GIF in my PR though. Have I interviewed? I’ve definitely used emojis, but I don’t think I’ve ever done a GIF.

Brittany Ellich (26:58) I did a gif.

Erika (26:59) A gift. ⁓ no.

Brittany Ellich (27:04) There’s one

actually that I did recently where I made some sort of a mistake and I used the Britney Spears oops I did it again gift. ⁓ And I loved doing that. Yeah, it depends on what it is. If it’s like something quick and unserious like that, then yeah, then I’ll do that. I’ll use a gift to make it. I don’t know. I like bringing levity to people’s work. And I always laugh when somebody says something that’s like really funny or like quirky or something like if they like have some like weird.

Bethany (27:13) amazing.

Erika (27:14) …

Yes.

Brittany Ellich (27:32) commit messages or something like that brings joy to me. So trying to bring that joy to other people that I work with too when possible.

Bethany (27:38) Yeah, bring back weird commit messages.

Erika (27:40) Hahaha

Bethany (27:41) I know that’s a spicy topic. Yeah, I don’t think I’ve, I don’t remember putting GIFs in my PRs, but I do put a lot of GIFs in ⁓ discussion posts. I don’t do it for presentations though, for an interesting point, but. ⁓

With discussion posts, I’ll try to have a theme. I think I’ve done Parks and Rec theme or the office theme or things like that, or Pokemon theme. I’ll try to do a header that grabs people’s attention with like, ⁓ what’s happening here? I don’t use GIFs for presentations though. A lot of people do this, but I think it’s overly distracting for the audience and takes away from what you’re saying because it’s constantly looping. If it loops once, I think that’s fine.

But if it’s continuously looping, like my eyes will definitely start focusing on that. And I think that just takes away from whatever you’re saying. So unless you’re planning on showing it for a very short period of time, like, I don’t think GIFs are good for presentations.

Brittany Ellich (28:35) I agree. think the only good gifts that I’ve seen in presentations is when it’s like a demo or something like that. And like it is something that you, you know, it’s benign enough in the background that like you can also pay attention to what somebody’s talking about. I’ve used them before for demos for things, especially when it comes to things like if I’m presenting something that is AI related and I don’t want to do a live demo because you never know what you’re going to get. It’s like a box of chocolates. So yeah, that’s the only place that I’ve seen them.

worthwhile.

Bethany (29:03) Totally agree. I’ll probably be using some of those in my Vim talk. I’ll definitely need to make sure that it’s respectful to the audience and that it doesn’t distract or it’s additive to the talk. Kind of going on this theme, are there any other tools or techniques you all reach for when creating a presentation or documentation where you want to craft a narrative?

Erika (29:25) I will read something out loud and see if it makes sense. That’s a pretty low, low-lift way of finding out if it reads like a story.

Brittany Ellich (29:35) When I actually just was writing something earlier today and one thing that I like to do is try to read it from different perspectives, like put myself in the shoes of like, all right, what does this look like if I’m somebody on the team that didn’t work on this? Or what if, what does this look like if I’m somebody on a different team that has no context of like what this team is working on to see like, what does this release mean to me? Like, is this actually important? So one thing that I usually like to do is to have a section that just says like, why is this important?

and use lot of headings and bold and like bullet points to like make it really easy to scan and probably make it look like it was written by Chad GPT. But like, I think there are a lot of styles from that that I’ve sort of adopted, especially since we use Markdown a lot at work for writing discussion posts and all that. ⁓

where I try to make it easy to find the information based on different personas of who might be reading it. having a TLDR at the top if you just want a summary of it or have a section that says, why is this important to our customers? Why is this important to my team? So make it easy to go find because I think a lot of times people don’t read documentation top to bottom. They typically look at it to scan it and just get the most important stuff and figure out what’s relevant to them.

So that’s typically what I like to do.

Erika (30:50) That makes me think too of accessibility of information and a lot of the same principles that we use when designing an accessible website also apply to this idea of discoverability. Like those headings, yes, they’re like, yeah, headings are a part of the…

like accessibility standard, like using the appropriate heading for a piece of information, which makes it easier for a screen reader to understand it, but it also applies for everybody. And to your point, like anybody reading this information will look for a certain like flow of headings, just like naturally. And so like adopting that mindset can help improve the experience for everybody.

Brittany Ellich (31:37) actually reminds me too that I have a blog post on the GitHub blog from like three months ago ⁓ with a member of the docs team where he, Sam Browning wrote, you know, a lot of details about like how to write a good doc and I wrote about like how to write good documentation as a whole. I’ll share it in the show notes. But yeah, making sure that things are easily scannable is pretty key.

Bethany (31:58) Yeah, absolutely. And to that point, I’ve found success recently with, especially in presentations that are to a larger group that might not have the same understanding of what I’m presenting, adding a glossary to the front of your slides and then sharing out the slides so people can keep it on that slide.

is really awesome for being able to ramp up quick with having the same language or the ubiquitous language for what your presentation needs. So I’ve done that a couple of times in our availability review. And this was part of the advice of somebody who was doing availability reviews a lot. And it’s been really awesome. And I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback from that. it seems that empathy is that you win when you’re empathetic to your audience or to who might be looking at this. So.

Empathy is a good first step to telling a good story. All right. Well, we are coming up to time. So let’s do our fun segment. I am actually stoked about this. I had AI create a mad libs. So I don’t even know what the story is going to be. But it’s developer related. And we’ll fill it out together.

So do we want the great incident response, deployment day drama, new developers first day, or architecture decision meeting?

Erika (33:17) decision meeting.

Bethany (33:18) Let’s do it. All right. So adjective describing importance.

Brittany Ellich (33:19) Let’s do it.

Regal.

Erika (33:23) ooo

Bethany (33:24) Okay, a noun, like a system component.

a cache widget. I like it. I like it. Let’s do that.

Erika (33:27) widget.

Brittany Ellich (33:29) yeah, which it is

a good one.

Bethany (33:31) Alright, a verb discussing action.

Brittany Ellich (33:34) Computing? processing’s better. Yeah, let’s do processing.

Erika (33:34) Processing.

Bethany (33:37) Wish I had Erica’s songs for SAT vocabulary and I’d be doing a lot better here. How about a large number? Like 40. one million. What about one billion? Yay.

Erika (33:41) you

Brittany Ellich (33:42) you

one million.

One billion.

Erika (33:50) Yes.

Bethany (33:51) All right, a senior developer name. Hmm.

Erika (33:54) Britney.

Brittany Ellich (33:55) I was trying to think like, ⁓ I was trying to think of something like generic man, man, John or something. Bethany can be the other one.

Bethany (33:55) How about another? ⁓ what?

Erika (34:04) I’m

Bethany (34:05) Alright, the other name will be John or Bethany. We’ll do John because he’s not here. Make him part of this. Adjective describing disagreement.

Erika (34:11) Just for you.

Hence.

Bethany (34:15) movie.

Brittany Ellich (34:16) I bet you did great on the SAT.

Bethany (34:16) Technology.

Yeah, I know. I’m so jealous right now. Actually, for listeners who might not know this, Erica is a star at Crossword. She does the New York Times Crossword like nothing else. How about a technology framework? What’s like technology slash framework? So we could do like Kubernetes or like Next.js. All right, I’ll do that.

Erika (34:18) you

Brittany Ellich (34:25) true.

Erika (34:28) you

Brittany Ellich (34:37) yeah, Kubernetes.

Bethany (34:39) Alright, a different technology.

Brittany Ellich (34:41) astro.

Bethany (34:42) Yeah.

okay, like a noun for a meeting room item. A marker.

Brittany Ellich (34:46) Stay Blur.

Bethany (34:47) All right, let’s do stapler, that’s Verb for a decision-making action.

excited, selected, nominated.

Erika (34:53) finalized?

finalize?

Bethany (34:55) I like that. All right. An adjective describing outcome.

succeeded, no, successful.

Erika (35:01) floppy.

Bethany (35:03) that’s

amazing. Do you want floppy or flappy maybe? Like a flappy monitor? All right, finally time period.

Erika (35:06) Slap you.

Brittany Ellich (35:12) Era.

Erika (35:13) Thank

Bethany (35:13) I love it.

All right, let’s generate our tech story. All right. The team gathered for a regal architecture review meeting to discuss our new widget system. We needed to process how to handle 1 billion concurrent users without breaking the bank. Brittany was convinced we should use Kubernetes, while John became tense and insisted that Astro was clearly the superior choice.

The debate got so intense that someone threw a stapler across the room. After three hours of

Erika (35:43) Definitely

John.

Bethany (35:44) Oh, man. Yeah, John is definitely the type to throw a stapler. After three hours of passionate discussion, we finally decided to finalize and go with a hybrid approach that made everyone equally flappy. Six era later, we realized we should have just used a simple database and called it a day. But hey, at least our documentation is impressive.

Alright, that was fun. That was! You had to like modify for tense live, but we have three more of these so maybe another episode we can come back to it.

Erika (36:09) Maybe I’ll go first.

Yes. ⁓

Brittany Ellich (36:20) fun.

Bethany (36:22) All

right. Wow. With that, thank you so much for tuning into Overcommitted. If you like what you hear, please do follow, subscribe, or do whatever it is you like to do on the podcast app of your choice. Check us out on Blue Sky and share with your friends. As a reminder, we are still leading a Looks Good to Me book club, and there is still plenty of time to get involved. It’s all async, so please feel free to leave comments on old discussions, new discussions, all that. Check out the show notes for more info. Until next week.

Bye.