By Ravikumar Babu | Member
I got hooked on stamps ever since I first saw them when I was a kid, but little did I know that collecting stamps would be useful in my career.
As a technical writer for software applications, I spend a significant amount of time information gathering. In many instances, I am called at the last moment with very little time to pull up my socks and get productive. There have been situations in which the requirements and design documents did not exist or were not up to date. In these situations, I had to get information from subject matter experts. A keen sense of curiosity is required for a technical writer to come up with relevant questions. This is where I find my research skills gained from collecting stamps useful in information gathering.
I am fascinated by the beauty of stamps as a miniature piece of art. They act as windows to the history, geography, people, and culture of far away countries. The image on every stamp has a piece of information, message, or story to convey. Collecting stamps all these years has cultivated in me a desire to know more. Moreover, mounting stamps in albums by country and themes has refined my organizational skills. The process of gaining knowledge on a stamp can be used to gather information on a software feature. I have illustrated this idea in the following image.
The questions in the image are fundamental, but they can lead to more relevant ones. For example, a country-specific stamp collector may think of questions related to the country that issued the stamp. Similarly, an application programming interface writer may come up with questions on how the feature is implemented in code.
When I think about my childhood, I feel I learned more from stamp collecting than from any other activity. I am not claiming that I used these skills from the day I became a technical writer. In fact, I never realized that the skills I learned through stamp collecting could be used in my job. This realization happened when I progressed from a mere stamp collector to a knowledgeable one. I still have a long way to go to become a philatelist.
Helvetia and Helvetica
My father gave his stamp collection to me when I was a kid. Some stamps in his collection had strange names on them. One of those names was Helvetia. I discovered that they are stamps of Switzerland. Years later, when I first heard about Helvetica typeface, I became curious to know whether these words were related. According to Wikipedia, the Helvetica typeface was designed in a foundry in Switzerland with a different name. It was renamed Helvetica, which means Swiss in Latin; Helvetia is the Latin name for Switzerland. A documentary film titled Helvetica was released in 2007 to mark the 50th anniversary of the typeface.
Ravikumar Babu is a technical communicator at Mahindra Satyam. He is a certified usability analyst. He tweets at @ravikumar_babu. You can email him at baburavikumar@yahoo.com.
