Shanghai Tech Writer

Every year around middle of October, National Instruments, the company I work for, holds NI-TC at the corporate office in Austin, Texas. It’s a two-day conference for the entire technical communication department to get together and discuss issues that are relevant to our work as technical communicators.

NI-TC is a great opportunity for everyone in the department, including technical writers, localization engineers, documentation production specialists, and managers to get together. During the conference, different speakers share about various topics such as the documentation process, latest trend in technical communication, localization issues, and new technology and tools. We also have a demo fair to showcase a few cool projects that different people or groups have worked on in the last year. Some of these cool projects include tools that simplify documentation tasks, product demonstrations, and solutions to the challenges we face as a growing company/department.  We also hand out various awards like technical writing excellence, documentation production excellence, localization excellence, rookie of the year, superlatives, and innovation of the year. And lastly, the conference ends with a deck party.

From Shanghai to Austin

I had the wonderful opportunity to attend NI-TC this year! It’s the “first time” of many things for me:

• First time on a business trip
• First time attending a work conference
• First time visiting Texas
• First time at NI corporate office
• First time meeting the rest of the tech comm department
• First time meeting some of the people I collaborate with remotely from Shanghai
• First time attending NI-TC
• First time presenting at NI-TC

Yes, I gave a presentation at NI-TC and the topic was “Learning Styles and Technical Writing.” I’ll be writing a few blog posts in the coming weeks about my experience at NI-TC as well as the topic I presented at the conference. I apologize in advance if the posts are slow in coming. I’ve been traveling extensively the past few weeks (East Coast, West Coast, Southwest) and have taken a hiatus from my blogging gig. All the posts that you’ve been reading the past few week were written way in advance prior to my travels. Once I return to Shanghai (next week) and catch up on a million and one things, I’ll be writing more posts.

Stay tuned!

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