Writing for people who will never meet you

Notes from the talk, written up the same evening while the questions were still fresh.

The premise

Most technical writing is addressed to the person sitting next to you. The reader who actually shows up is a stranger, two years later, halfway through a bad day.

What changes

You stop writing "obviously". You define the term the first time. You say what you tried that did not work, because that is the part they cannot reconstruct.

The question I could not answer

Someone asked how you write for a stranger without writing for nobody. I still think the answer is that you pick one real person and let the stranger overhear.