At work, the Engineering department (read: software developers and QA people) recently reorganized into four large, overarching groups. Within each group, the smaller development teams do similar work.

Meanwhile, my team, the technical writing team, comprises two Help Center writers. Pretty naturally we each took coverage of two development groups.

This works fine, but the new development groups shuffle up some of the areas of expertise we, the technical writers, previously covered. We keep our areas of core expertise (for me, reporting, and for her, trading), but some of what I did goes to my coworker. Now, for example, my coworker takes over documenting third-part integrations, which I previously covered. Meanwhile, I pick up covering teams neither of us have ever documented — a group that does all the development for internal tools and back-end data management. Most of this content I’ll delegate to our new Knowledge Base writer, but some may be worth documenting in Help Center.

All that to say that yesterday I attended a demo by the euphoniously named Ingestion Group, which works on getting data into and throughout the product smoothly. Here are my actual meeting notes:

I feel confident sharing these notes because they contain zero company information.

Later I asked Ian about the rabbit thing — it’s actually called RabbitMQ — and then actually did a meeting with the developer who presented that part of the demo. He kindly used small words, short sentences, and simple metaphors (“It’s like a bucket with a lot of hoses coming in”) in his explanation, so I may have a very tenuous grasp on the simplest possible explanation of this tool.

The thing was — although I don’t need to know this, per se, I really enjoyed the learning process. I didn’t think I’d get much value from the demo, and although I didn’t learn about any new stories that need documentation, I did expand my horizons a little bit. And that’s always a good thing.