I have a fancy curved 49” Samsung monitor on my home computer for evaluating products for professional reasons—or as my wife calls it: “Playing games”. It is nice because I have a row of Post-it notes at the bottom for potential subjects to write about. This week, I have a note that says “Split PDF Learning Style”, and it took me about an hour to remember what that meant. Note to everyone: “How to remember gooder” is a future conversation. I had some trouble remembering this week’s topic for a second reason: I wanted to write “Why I think Diablo IV is a stupid game.” I am going to complete the story mode before I shake my fist at all of you teenagers and explain why I think this game is the last Diablo game I am going to purchase. If the game graces me with a good ending, I may recant that position.
So what the hell is a split PDF and what does it have to do with learning styles?
I may have mentioned once or twice that I play World of Warcraft. I run a late-night raid guild (always recruiting the ranged dps!), and treasure the start of each new tier when we enter the new raid.
Every raider prepares for the raid differently. Some people watch a lot of videos. Some people read all of the strategies on the web. Some people wait to show up and get an explanation from the raid leader.
One thing we do each new tier is that we blindly pull each boss once. This means there is some subset of our team who has no idea what to expect at all. Especially me. I learn best from experience, and this is one way to really get into it very quickly.
Yes, I am an experiential learner. I struggle to learn by watching videos, and I can kinda get the gist of things by reading the strategy guides. I learn the best by jumping in and doing things. When we want to discuss ideas or develop products, I am the first person to want to workshop things and make some prototypes.
Which brings us to the PDF.
For some strange reason, ADOBE winds up winning so many of the format wars. From the decades of horror and “punch the monkey” banner ads, Adobe Flash was one of the default standards for web content creation. Much like the fax machine, that died a much-needed death a long time ago.
PDF is starting to feel the same thing to me.
We get a lot of work documentation in PDF format and trying to make sense of it can be like trying to figure out the color of a cupcake by licking it.
PDF documentation needs to have some better web viewing modes that are not “print this out on paper like it is the 1980s”. On a widescreen monitor, there are a bunch of settings you can tweak in your browser or PDF viewer to make the document marginally more presentable, but the inability for PDFs to be really viewable on the internet is probably why people pay for Atlassian Confluence. As an aside, I will save my rants about Confluence for another day.
Creating and sharing documentation is a fundamentally important task for making excellent software. It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools, and I will wear that “I am a poor craftsman, and all I got for it is this crummy t-shirt” proudly while I point the finger and sneer at the PDF format and its current dominance in documentation formatting.
We are all doing our very best and this is one of those things that I glare at and think “Do better”.
I love it when I see developers, product managers, designers, and customers achieve shared understanding expressed through great products. Sometimes the path to that greatness leads us through difficult journeys and attempts to teach how to use that product that needs 17th-century “here be monsters” warnings. If you have some preferred formats for sharing product documentation in the “not PDF” bucket, my DMs are open, and my inbox is waiting.
Thank you for reading along. I do have a rant about Diablo IV coming. I also have a long conversation coming about World of Warcraft. The latter post is going to wait a while. This last week Blizzard returned the Holy Paladin play style to the way I like it after many years, and I am not ready to assume the guilt of shitting all over them after they made the game fun for me again. They Made Paladins Great Again, and I hope you join me in ordering some sweet, sweet Paladin merch to celebrate this occasion. An Amazon-affiliated link is here for you to not click on.
I hope to see all of you wonderful people here again next week.
