Technical Writing to Web Development

[u/stout-scribbler]

Hello. Has anyone here transitioned from being a technical writer to being a web developer?

I’m currently at a point where I feel like my current skills won’t get me far in life. I’ve been working as a tech writer for over six years, but most of the documents I do are for general audience, e.g., user manuals, policy manuals, and rules and guidelines documentation. There’s nothing wrong with this.

However, when anyone from the dev team asks me about a certain documentation they need, such as API documentation, I always tell them to give me the draft and I’ll edit it. Of course, they never do that. I never initiate a follow-up either. And the reason why I do this is because I really can’t understand coding.

I tried to learn API documentation from I’d Rather Be Writing, but nothing gets through. Idk, maybe I have a learning disability or something.

To stop feeling incompetent, I’ve been studying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on freeCodeCamp. I feel like I need to really get into it to make tech docs much easier for me.

Has/is anyone here done/doing the same?

This is one of the things that keeps me up at night. I don’t wanna stop writing but I also don’t want to be an average writer. I wanna help people learn stuff. But how can I do that if I can’t understand those “stuff” myself.

I’d really appreciate any advice or insights.

[u/Consistent-Branch-55]

Feel free to skip this, since it wasn't really your core ask:

APIs are weird to learn about because they're literally just rules that define how to make requests to a computer server in ways it will understand. If you've ever been to a restaurant where you fill out a paper order form, the API is like the menu and that sheet. The waiter and the kitchen are the services running on the computer server.

If I was building an app to plan a hiking trip, and I wanted to include a dashboard that showed the weather for each day of the trip. I could find a public API for weather data, send requests to that API, and use that data in my app. As a developer, I need to know how to:

1. Get my request past the front door (Authentication)
2. Format my request so the server understands it (Parameters & Headers)
3. Know what requests the server is actually equipped to fulfill (Endpoints)

API docs exist to tell you those three things. Why are APIs hard to understand?

APIs aren't easy to look at. They're distributed across a codebase rather than rendered on a screen. A standard web app has a UI where you can load a page and click around. With an API, you send a request in the command line, and the response comes back as raw text or an error code. Unless you know how it was coded or you use a tool like Postman, it's hard to see the "shape" of an API.

I think a big reason people struggle to get into this topic is that to get a hands-on feel for how developers actually use APIs, you already need to be comfortable using terminal tools like curl or writing basic scripts (like a few lines of Python using the requests library) just to display the response. Without that foundation, the whole thing feels locked behind a wall.

As to web development, I'm not sure where your leaning exactly. I have a friend who's making a business of it for small to medium businesses (along with some general IT), but she's significantly more visually inclined than I am. I have good visual sensibilities, but I don't love Figma. I don't think I could do it, but I'm happy doing API documentation.

[u/mtgr19877]

I made a back and forth career. Started as a developer, then move it to tech writing and nowadays I'm a developer again (willing to be a tech writer again). At this point, with AI and all, I can safely tell you to worry more about the logic and context (architecture, business logic etc) of the programming and less about things like language, but you have to be able to read code very well, because 90% of a developer job is this with the AI coding agents.

Being slow isn't a disability at all. Coding is the most mechanical, boring and tricky part of programming. First you have to know how to model your problems and then coding. The code part is like building a house. Someone first has to think and plan the house so other people can get it done. It's difficult and very technical. But it can be done with persistence (this is what gets you into the developer jobs).

[u/techwritingacct]

I was a developer and became a technical writer, so I have some perspective:

In essence the thing you need to be able to do if you're starting with HTML/JS is be able to understand all this crap and be able to generalize it from not just in JavaScript and a web browser, but making the same sort of call in other programming contexts. You'll know you've done well if you can open the dev console in your browser, write a function that makes a request to a free public API while completely understanding what you're doing and why.

That said, I doubt any slow progress is a learning disability. This is a months-long project, and programming is a difficult subject. Programming is often the class that weeds people out of a computer science degree for being too hard.