Tools, Languages, Formats

Skills evolve and even whither. 15 years ago I was a Framemaker and Perl wiz. At that time, I crafted a UI in Perl/Tk for programmatically interacting with Frame files. Do I remember those skills now? No. Nine years ago I wrote an XSL/HTML front end for an XML db–it remains the slickest Registry Reference on the internet, but could I tell you how I wrote those thousand lines of XSL today? Not likely. However, the point is workers should adapt to the task at hand and–over time–become versatile and tool savvy. My skills-du-jour are currently Python/regex/HTML.

Please note the following:

My coding skills are high relative to other technical writers–but low relative to engineers.
I can programmatically push strings around all day long and make JS widgets tap dance on the web, but I leverage the web (e.g. StackOverflow) and open source libraries–I’m not writing functions from scratch.

Scripting and automation overview

_images/videoicon.png — Brief synopsis of Ben’s coding skills

Application and language experience

Visual Studio Code

I discovered VSC in 2020 and dropped a dozen other tools. Most of my work happens in VSC.