AMA with Technical Writer Yvonne Grealy
By Raman Kang
Yvonne Grealy is a cat mum and Technical Writer for Hyperwallet, a fintech company owned by PayPal. A recent import from Ireland, Yvonne had previously been working for Ericsson as a Software Engineer in Ireland before moving to Vancouver 2 years ago. Upon arriving, Yvonne discovered her passion for effectively communicating technical product specifications and integrations to external customers and internal stakeholders. She also co-leads the Vancouver branch of Unity, a group dedicated to creating opportunities for women in PayPal. All of these experiences made her the perfect person to have an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session with in The Collective.
Q: Yvonne! I feel like technical writing is a kinda semi misunderstood path. What the heck is the day to day of technical writing?
A: Super question, and not one that I’m sure I could have answered until I started doing it. The best way to describe it is I make the products/solutions I am writing about comprehensive and straightforward for our clients to understand and utilize them. That can have many layers, from merely describing them in a business sense, to getting down and dirty with code snippets and how a developer can integrate them into their systems.
Q: What’s your journey / how did you become a technical writer?
A: My journey has many weird twists and turns, so I’ll try and condense it as much as possible.
After school, I started a degree in Software Development, which I dropped out of after a year and a bit because I was young and wanted to do other things.
I started working for Ernst & Young, creating financial statements for client audits.
I moved to France for six months and worked on managing a campsite.
I returned to Ireland and worked as an administrator for a software company and started studying early childcare at night.
Once I qualified, I spent a year working in an Irish language preschool and studied psychology by night.
I then started working with children with disabilities until I had a car accident and couldn’t do any manual lifting anymore, which ruled me out of doing this anymore.
I had always wanted to go back and get my degree in Software, but I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to do it, so I did a Computer Science certificate and then bit the bullet and got my degree in Software Development.
I then worked as a software engineer before moving to Canada.
Once in Canada, I started interviewing for engineering roles, and they just didn’t seem to be working out for me. Someone I met at a WIT event reached out to me and offered to refer me for some technical writing freelance work I said I would try. That was when I knew that I had found what I wanted to continue with.
Q: What sort of skillset or ‘type of person’ do you think suits the technical writing role?
A: I heard someone say to me that all technical writers are either software developers or people writing novels on the side! I think the main things you need are:
An interest in what you will be writing about
Communicate well with people. That is what you are doing when writing. You will also frequently need to reach out to many different stakeholders, from the developers who may only speak in tech terms to product managers who want the information clear and concise for the end-user.
Attention to detail is essential.
A thick skin - you will always make mistakes, never make everyone happy, and you will still be able to improve on what you’ve done in the past.
Q: I’d love to hear about a difficult problem you’ve helped solve and concrete steps you’ve taken to get others on board with your ideas. Are there times when this has been challenging? What did you do to get buy-in?
A: The role I’m currently in is not just a run of the mill tech writing role. When I joined, there was very little documentation available to our clients, mainly technical specifications for APIs, and it was not being kept up-to-date and accurate. A huge emphasis was put on completely overhauling the current documentation and creating comprehensive documentation to cover all of the products and services.
It has been an enormous project (still ongoing), which I was given a lot of trust and responsibility to make it a reality. Also, I had to gain my colleagues’ confidence and get their buy-in that our documentation would be accurate, comprehensive and worth contributing to.
I’m pretty pleased to say that it has been a successful endeavour to this point, with bumps in the road, of course, but there has been so much good feedback from staff and clients alike that I get to feel proud.
Q: Hi, Yvonne, as you mentioned in the first question, you have to be involved with a host of different projects. With such a wide range of product specifications, what are some tips you have for getting familiarized with a product to write about it confidently?
A: I guess a significant benefit for me is having studied and worked with specific programming languages. I have a familiarity, so at least some of the time, things make logical sense to me. Testing what I’m going to write about (when possible) is an unrivalled way of understanding how something works and how it can be implemented.
Most importantly, I rely heavily on all the people involved in the process. I rely on the product owners to give me useful information, e.g. why we provide something, what problem we are trying to solve. I rely on the devs to help me when I want to test something I need to write about, e.g. if I want to write about an API endpoint, I need to know what attributes are used in the query so I can do them myself. And I rely on getting people to review my work to ensure that it is both correct and that it can be understood. Content will often go through several iterations before it is ready to be made public.
We have an incredible lineup of women who will be participating in our AMA sessions throughout September and October. Join The Collective to get in on events like this.