LornaJane

Welcome! I’m Lorna: open source technology leader and developer experience engineer. I’m a striking combination of technical experience, communication skills, and a genuine love for enabling others to succeed. I’m a leader, an engineer, a writer, a user champion, an open source maintainer, and a public speaker. My passion is taking great technology, and making it a great experience for users.

On this site you’ll find my blog, links to things I’ve done in other places, and my contact details. I’m always happy to hear from others in the industry and you are welcome to reach out to me with requests for articles, podcasts, or speaking – I can’t do everything, but that doesn’t stop me trying!

From The Blog

27 Apr

2024

Checking Links in Docs-As-Code Projects

Creating content requires accuracy as well as creativity and the ability to deliver. Working with docs-as-code gives a strong foundation and structure to work within, and means there’s a clear workflow where automation can be added to help us with the easy stuff, such as “do all these links work?”.

I really appreciate having the extra confidence and support of these types of tools, and having implemented them on multiple projects at this point, I thought I’d share my advice for anyone looking to do the same. Continue reading →

Posted in tech | Leave a reply

25 Mar

2024

Reviewdog filter settings with GitHub Actions

Reviewdog is a tool to use with GitHub actions for applying review tools in your CI. I use it with Vale, and it’s really good. One thing that has tripped me up multiple times is that by default, it only applies the checks to the changes in the pull request, not to the whole project. So when you add something like Vale, which is a prose linter, it only checks … the workflow file you just added! I always forget that it works this way, and how to change it, so I’m pasting some examples for future reference. Continue reading →

Posted in tech | Leave a reply

24 Jan

2024

Short tech writing style guide for developers

Style guides are vital to successful publishing projects, but they are usually too extensive for casual contributors. After running a number of projects with developers rather than specialist documentarians as the main contributors, I’ve started using a short-form style guide, short enough to be read and used by people who don’t spend as much time thinking about these things as a full time writer does. The main version is published on GitHub, but I’m also sharing the current version here. Continue reading →

Posted in tech | 2 Replies

From The Blog

Checking Links in Docs-As-Code Projects

Reviewdog filter settings with GitHub Actions

Short tech writing style guide for developers

Talks, Articles, Podcasts, and More

Developer Experience in Open Source Projects

Open Source DocOps

Intro to OpenAPI

Redocly and OpenAPI

Docs-As-Code, for Coders

Repeatably Better APIs