Microblog

PR Focus v1.1.0 is live, bringing you two new requested features and some new accessibility settings 🎉

• Tag PRs. Create custom tags in PR Focus and apply them to your PRs. Track important activity across feature development, bug fixes, or a specific project - even across repos. Filter by tag and date range in the new Tagged PRs dashboard to report on activity to key stakeholders.
• Automatically Watch, Ignore, or Tag PRs with Filters. Create custom filters based on PR author username, title, description, or repository. With user-defined filters, PR Focus can automatically ignore Snyk dependency PRs, for example, or automatically watch or Tag PRs following a specific naming convention.
• Accessibility settings: display text instead of glyphs for PR status and review status.

For more details, including links to the docs for these new features, check out the announcement: https://prfocus.app/news/2024/08/12/introducing-tags-and-filtering-in-pr-focus/

Another weekend is here, so it's time to work on my app - i.e. PR Focus!

My reach is very limited, so I'm doing some marketing and sponsorships to let more people know about my helpful little app. Since I'm spending money on it, I want to know how it's performing.

But - I refuse to use Google Analytics, or any tracking software that sells user data. (I also don't use Google - I pay for a private search engine that doesn't track me - and I bounce from sites where I can't opt out of cookies. But that's a story for another day!)

You know what doesn't track you or sell your data? A C library written in the 90s that aggregates data from web server logs.

I just spent 2 hours building out a spreadsheet to aggregate the data I want to track across different sources (website, Apple App Store Connect). I can pull info from my server log reports to populate the website data in my spreadsheet, and pull data from App Store Connect to track activity and sales.

Is it perfect attribution? Nope.

But it respects the privacy of my users.

Be the change you want to see.

Now that PR Focus 1.0 is live, I'm free to start working on new features again!

So here's a sneak peek at what's coming in the next release...

• The ability to tag PRs in PR Focus.
  • Easily track work related to a specific project or release, even across repos.
  • View PRs with a given tag, and optionally within a specific date range.
• The ability to create filters in PR Focus.
  • Automatically Watch, Ignore, or Tag incoming PRs that meet criteria you define.
  • Have Bug/Feature naming conventions? Tag all the PRs that come in with your title criteria with a "Bug" or "Feature" tag so you can easily keep track of important work.
  • Want to always ignore a certain type of PR? Automatically Ignore PRs you don't care about, such as dependency update PRs from Snyk.

These new features are all in, working, and tested - I'm just cleaning up UI elements preparing docs! Expect to see these in an update within the next week or two. 🎉

My macOS app, PR Focus, is now live on the Mac App Store! 🎉

I really appreciate all the feedback I've gotten from the beta test group. Now that 1.0 is launched, I'm looking forward to digging into some of the new feature requests I've gotten!

(I may have dreamed about code last night for one of those new features... sleep can't slow me down!)

If you have ever wanted to know the status of a pull request - or a bunch of pull requests - without having to go to GitHub to check on them, give PR Focus a try!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prfocus/id6449602269

I’m prepping a “Tech Writing 101” talk for our interns about working with external stakeholders.

For the purpose of this talk, I’m defining “external stakeholders” as members of the org but outside of the immediate documentation team - I.e. product managers, engineers, etc.

Curious if anyone has any good tips/process/strategy recommendations that might be valuable for interns to learn. I’m riding the balance of “what skills does someone at that point in their career need to develop” with “a glimpse of what it might look like as they progress in their career.”

Thoughts?

It has been an awesome first week of public beta for my upcoming app, PR Focus!

I've gotten - and fixed - 4 bug reports. I'm testing a new private build today, and assuming it all looks good, I'll push out an updated build this weekend.

I've also gotten some fantastic new feature requests that I've added to the post-launch roadmap: the ability to tag and filter pull requests!

Tagging will enable you to create your own arbitrary groupings in PR Focus without having to expose the tags via GitHub. So you can tag pull requests across different repos as related to a specific feature, for example, and see them all in one place.

Filters will allow you to define custom rules to automatically Watch, Ignore, or Tag incoming pull requests. So you can automatically Ignore Snyk dependency update PRs, for example, or automatically apply specific tags for PRs matching keywords you define.

Thanks for the awesome ideas, beta testers! These new features sound great.

I've still got a few spots open in the public beta - I'd love to hear from you!

https://testflight.apple.com/join/PmdjrF6U

After more than 2 years of work (April 6, 2022!), my macOS app, PR Focus, is finally ready for public beta!

If you are a #TechnicalWriter who works with engineers who occasionally forget to mention when something needs a documentation update, or...

If you are a #Developer or #DocsAsCode technical writer who makes or reviews PRs, or is assigned work in GitHub...

You might find PR Focus a useful tool to help you keep track of PRs across multiple repositories - all in a single dashboard.

I've just finished adding more info and some App Preview videos to the website: https://prfocus.app/

I have been using it daily at work for over a year in its current incarnation, have had a group of colleagues using it to provide feedback, and am finally satisfied enough with the level of fit and finish to share it with others. I have gotten so much value from it, it has kept me learning and working through the queue of bugs and grown to the point that it might be quite useful to others.

If you're interested in joining the public beta, you can join the TestFlight beta group here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/PmdjrF6U

Continuing my series about testing the code examples in documentation, I've just put up a post about what to test in docs code examples.

Spoiler alert: it might be both more and less than you think!

Curious to hear how this resonates with other #TechnicalWriters - particularly SDK and API #Documentation teams.

We are getting into the holiday season, and it seems like the velocity of feature delivery slows down this time of year. How do you like to use this slower time of year? Are there proactive projects that you tackle? Maintenance work you prioritize? Planning so you can hit the ground running in the new year?

My team is working on a couple of projects that require cross-team alignment, and we’re also planning to swarm on something that hasn’t gotten much attention in the second half of this year. I am also trying to squeeze in some maintenance stuff. Somehow I manage to fill up even the slow times! Curious how my fellow #TechnicalWriters and #Documentarians use this time of year.

For the past few weeks, I've been deep diving into my fall hackathon project. Today, I'm breaking down how I used the data I ingested from Google Sheets to create awesome MongoDB Charts to visualize documentation metadata for my team.

If you'd like to know what charts I built, how I set them up, and what questions I'm hoping they can answer for my team, check it out!

Are you a technical writer who has something similar for your team? I'd love to hear what data you track, how you use it, how you visualize it, and how you share it.