The Curious Engineer

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This is important

thisisimportant.net

Sarah Moir is a tech writer in San Francisco, CA, USA. Read the output of her curiosity-driven research into music metadata, technical writing practices, documentation for startups and SaaS, data analysis practices, and more.

Software / engineering practiceMusicEssays / personal

’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
195 from 1 Jan 2001 to 27 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (9 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://thisisimportant.net/feed.xml

2026 7

  1. Inform a small documentation project with data
  2. Inform a medium-sized documentation project with data
  3. Inform a large documentation project with data
  4. Prepare to write data-informed documentation
  5. Practicing data-informed documentation
  6. Manage AI-driven docs contributions
  7. My 2025 in music: A review

2025 10

  1. Developing an AI strategy for documentation
  2. Save a horse, use a content strategy
  3. Music metadata: What it is and why it matters
  4. Are AI chatbots docs?
  5. Data maintenance matters
  6. Where search keyword data comes from
  7. On the objectivity of data-driven decisions
  8. My writing setup
  9. My favorite music and more from 2024
  10. My evolving music discovery pipeline

2024 8

  1. How did my listening evolve? Spotify Wrapped 2024
  2. Domain ownership of ccTLDs and sovereignty
  3. WHOIS vulnerabilities and TLDs
  4. When imperialism ends, so too might the popular .io ccTLD
  5. AI and a duty of care
  6. A career bucket list for technical writers
  7. Docs as code is a broken promise
  8. What about GIFs instead of screenshots?

2023 15

  1. Wrapping up my 2023 in music
  2. Recommended blogs
  3. Displaying content as a graph: An exploration
  4. Should you add screenshots to documentation?
  5. Improving documentation findability in an age of low-quality search results
  6. The format of your online technical content matters
  7. Why web design sucks now
  8. How to add documentation to your product life cycle
  9. Don't replace your user community with an LLM-based chatbot
  10. Documenting machine learning models
  11. AI and tech ethics resources
  12. The value in research gaps
  13. Considering types of meetings
  14. Chat apps are no substitute for documentation
  15. Measuring data (and documentation) quality is hard

2022 7

  1. Music trends and data errors: 2022 in music
  2. Spotify Wrapped 2022: My listening personality and more
  3. Where to start with analytics for documentation
  4. Will we see prompt-based music generation?
  5. Tips for writing SaaS documentation
  6. Technical documentation as a map
  7. Write better docs with a product thinking mindset

2021 3

  1. 2021 in Music: Spotify Wrapped, Last.fm, and Ethical Music Consumption
  2. Top Business / Management / Leadership Books by and/or about Womxn
  3. From Nothing to Something with Minimum Viable Documentation

2020 16

  1. How can I get better at writing?
  2. Wrapping up 2020: Spotify, SoundCloud, and Last.fm data
  3. Define the question: How missing data biases data-driven decisions
  4. Collect the data: How missing data biases data-driven decisions
  5. Manage the data: How missing data biases data-driven decisions
  6. Analyze the data: How missing data biases data-driven decisions
  7. Visualize the data: How missing data biases data-driven decisions
  8. Communicate the data: How missing data biases data-driven decisions
  9. Decide with the data: How missing data biases data-driven decisions
  10. What’s missing? Reduce bias by addressing data gaps in your analysis process
  11. How do you make large scale harm visible on the individual level?
  12. Repersonalizing Digital Communications: Against Standardizing and Interfering Mediations
  13. Listening to Music while Sheltering in Place
  14. Why the quality of audio analysis metadatasets matters for music
  15. What it takes to get to a concert
  16. Problems with Indexing Datasets like Web Pages

2019 14

  1. Wrapping up the year and the decade in music: Spotify vs my data
  2. Unbiased data analysis with the data-to-everything platform: unpacking the Splunk rebrand in an era of ethical data concerns
  3. Streaming, the cloud, and music interactions: are libraries a thing of the past?
  4. Music streaming and sovereignty
  5. Defining my career values
  6. Detailed data types you can use for documentation prioritization
  7. Just Add Data: Using data to prioritize your documentation
  8. The Concepts Behind the Book: How to Measure Anything
  9. Not sober curious, just sober
  10. Planning and analyzing my concert attendance with Splunk
  11. Engaging with San Francisco history as a newcomer
  12. Data enrichment at ingest-time, not search time, with Cribl
  13. Making Concert Decisions with Splunk
  14. So you want to be a technical writer

2018 5

  1. My 2018 Year in Music: Data Analysis and Insights
  2. Politeness in Virtual Assistant Design
  3. Rediscovering Me and Moving Forward
  4. This is the new year
  5. Unexpectedly ccTLDs

2017 32

  1. Best of 2017: Live Shows
  2. Best of 2017: Books
  3. Best of 2017: Newly-Discovered Music
  4. Reflecting on a decade of (quantified) music listening
  5. Yoga Beta for Climbers
  6. Finding Myself on the Wall
  7. Country-specific search results
  8. Who gives you the Internet?
  9. IPv4 trafficking in Romania
  10. Where is the Internet decentralized?
  11. Unrepresented languages on the web
  12. Language homogenization on the web
  13. Languages on the web matter for self identity
  14. Top-level domains and nationalism
  15. Politics and server locations
  16. The borderless internet is a myth
  17. Who owns the ccTLDs?
  18. Searching without words
  19. The Balkanization of the Internet
  20. Chance thanks Obama for us with a ccTLD
  21. The tech media isn't flat
  22. Less infrastructure, more control over the Internet
  23. Sofar Sounds: So far from DIY
  24. Catalonia's Referendum and the Internet
  25. Universal language translation: thx, Google
  26. Borders on the Web Series
  27. Data as a Gift: Implications for Product Design
  28. Feature Names Matter
  29. My impressions from the 2017 Bay Area Book Festival
  30. Tips for live tweeting an event
  31. 2015 Resolutions, 2016 Music, and 2017
  32. Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu: Watching and Sharing on the Web

2016 5

  1. Physical technology and inherited meeting places
  2. The Politics of Crisis Communication
  3. tweetthedocs: Use Twitter to meet your users where they are
  4. Where Scanning the Internet Gets You
  5. Kill Legacy Apple Software

2015 13

  1. On Broken Music Discovery and the Fragmentation of Music Libraries
  2. Security Communications: Lessons from the National Weather Service
  3. Affective Computing and Adaptive Help
  4. Protect Your Accounts and Devices
  5. Discomfort, Trust, and Digital Selves
  6. Sewing and the Supply Chain
  7. Advertising Alternatives: It Pays to Be a Google Contributor
  8. Accessibility, Sound, and Communication
  9. Dams, Fish, and Engineering Disasters
  10. Prescriptive Design and the Decline of Manuals
  11. Data Privacy Day!
  12. Libraries, Digital Advertising, and the Machine Zone
  13. So This Is The New Year

2014 42

  1. Torture, Ownership, and Privacy
  2. Taylor Swift and Being Between Stars
  3. Quantified Health and Software Apps
  4. Reading, Drones, and Georgie Washington
  5. Public Transit and Technology - Chicago Edition
  6. Three Types of Health
  7. Research, Atomkraft, and Mining
  8. Power to the Microbes!
  9. Parks, America, and Reading
  10. Reading, Writing, and GIFs
  11. Homemade Döner Kebab
  12. What to Do, Messaging, and Ability
  13. Children, Espionage, and Pain
  14. Misogyny, Maya Angelou, and Words
  15. Memorials, Public Health, and Empathy
  16. Algorithms, Confidence, and Infrastructure
  17. Software, Sharing, and Music
  18. Journalism, Networks, and Grief
  19. Masculinity, AIM, Ads, and Cops
  20. Language, Music, and Holidays
  21. The Evolution of Music Listening
  22. Heartbleed, Borders, and Cookies
  23. Work, Sleep, and Accessibility
  24. Noise, Medicine, and Music
  25. Physics, Social Media, and Data Privacy
  26. My Photo Here
  27. What is Old is New Again: Following Up
  28. Women, the Web, and the App Takeover
  29. Identity on the Internet
  30. Bitcoin, Security, and Photography
  31. Writing and Race
  32. Protest and Media
  33. Identity, amplification, and ownership on the Internet
  34. (Mental) Health, Poetry, and Media
  35. What is Old is New Again
  36. Higher Education, Interns, and IT Security
  37. Design, Destruction, and Reading
  38. Location, Location, Location
  39. Through Snowstorms, Sickness, and Blogging
  40. Autobiography through (Musical) Devices (Part Rogue)
  41. Memory, Experience, and Privilege
  42. Transactive Memory and the Machines

2013 15

  1. Life, Living, and Death
  2. Humanity and Machines
  3. What would I say?
  4. Handwritten Texts
  5. A Narrative of Bits and Pieces
  6. Are you digitally literate?
  7. Self-Analytics
  8. Encounters with the Internet
  9. Some notes on surveillance and national security
  10. A Self-Driving Car "Revolution"?
  11. In which privilege is revealed...
  12. Tech tidbit: an observation
  13. Metrication of the Self
  14. DPLA: A Digital Library for the Present
  15. A Beginning

2001 3

  1. About Sarah
  2. Follow this blog
  3. Newsletter Archives