#6 Technical Communication

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian dig into technical communication — one of the most underrated yet career-defining skills in engineering. They explore how to tailor your message to different audiences, why the curse of the expert derails so many technical conversations, how good documentation and code naming are themselves forms of communication, why architecture diagrams so often mislead, how to run blameless post-mortems, and why honesty and integrity are the foundations of trust in any technical discussion.

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

1:06 What is technical communication?

2:08 Understanding your audience

5:33 The curse of the expert

7:06 How to explain Kubernetes to non-technical people

9:54 Avoiding jargon with business stakeholders

11:35 Written communication: READMEs, comments, documentation

13:54 Using AI to maintain documentation intent

15:12 Architectural Decision Records

17:37 Naming things properly: services, teams and systems

21:41 API documentation

25:56 Empathy in communication

29:34 Improving public speaking

33:57 Drawing out quieter voices in meetings

35:01 Pre-meeting async writing

38:49 Integrity and saying I don't know

43:13 Learning what the business actually does

46:00 Blameless post-mortems and RCAs done right

49:06 Architecture diagrams: right level of abstraction

53:38 Deployment vs logical architecture diagrams

55:00 Executive-first documentation: start wide, go narrow

58:17 Summary: always lead with context and work down into detail

#6 Technical Communication

Show Notes