Featured TC: Dave Gash

October 2017

Dave Gash

Dave is a San-Diego based software professional with over thirty years of development, documentation, and training experience. Dave holds degrees in Business and Computer Science, and is well known in the technical writing community as an interesting and animated instructor. His teaching technique has been called “entertraining” making technology both accessible and fun.

When he is not on the road doing training or developing new material, for the likes of Google and Microsoft, Dave is a frequent speaker of Help-related seminar and conferences around the world. He will be in New Zealand for the TechCommNZ workshop series from November 2-8 in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. He caught up with Jim Costello to discuss.

Dave, can you please give us a brief overview of your experience developing help material?

I've written online help since the late 1980s, starting with RoboHelp (V1!), ForeHelp, and Doc-to-Help. I "grew up" as a programmer, and was usually the only one on the team who could construct a complete sentence, so when the other coders discovered that, I became the de facto documenter. I realised I have a knack for explaining technical material - and quite enjoy it, in fact - and I've been writing user assistance materials of various kinds ever since.

Why did you move into training?

By the 1990s, Help Authoring Tools (HATs) were enormously popular, and corporations with large writing teams needed group training to ensure both competence and consistency. That wasn't practical with standard written documentation, so I partnered with ForeHelp and RoboHelp to provide vendor-certified, instructor-led training classes. As HATs eventually began to lose focus as a major software genre, I broadened my emphasis and successfully taught HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, DITA, and other technologies in the corporate environment.

What are you working on at the moment?

Since 2012, I've been a Technical Writer at Google, and it's a fascinating and challenging position. The assignments vary wildly, from getting started tutorials to API documentation to interpreting W3C specifications. At the moment, I'm writing a series of articles to help web page authors learn how to make their pages load faster, a critical factor in site success - particularly as mobile devices become most users' primary method of web access. Google earnestly supports my commitment to doing speaking engagements, both for my own personal and professional development and as a way to give back to the technical community that has provided me with a great career these many years.

Ok moving on to the NZ workshops - CSS Novice to Ninja in a Day, can you briefly explain what this is about?

Although many tools exist to help authors create and structure their content, authors often feel left out on the issue of formatting or styling - rightly enough, they want to define not just what their content says, but how it is presented. That's exactly what Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is for: styling structured online content so that it is visually attractive, readable, and accessible. It's well proven that a properly styled web page increases readers' content acquisition, comprehension, and retention - and, after all, that's why we write content! This workshop takes attendees from the very basics of CSS styling, through the most common and important features, and all the way to some clever and exciting techniques.

Who should come?

This workshop is for any technical communicator who deals with HTML-based content and would like to understand - and, presumably, control - how their content is visually presented in a browser. No prior CSS coding knowledge is required or assumed, but some experience editing text-based files such as HTML pages and some knowledge of basic HTML tags will come in handy. In addition to explanatory lecture sections, participants will reinforce their new knowledge with hands-on exercises throughout the day as they build a beautifully styled HTML page.

How will our members benefit from attending?

Technical communicators who attend the workshop will learn:

  • what CSS is and what it's used for
  • the relationship between HTML pages and CSS files
  • how to tailor CSS to affect specific content
  • how to leverage CSS rules to reduce formatting work
  • how to use CSS for previously JavaScript-only effects

It's no exaggeration to say that writers will leave the workshop knowing much more about CSS than most of their peers!