What’s the worst time to be stuck in traffic?

It’s a tie for any time before March 31, 1999.

That’s the date that TiVo was released, the first digital video recorder. Until that time, if you were bumper-to-bumper on the Interstate during a show you just… missed it.

Here I was, almost exactly a year before that date, stuck in traffic, about to miss the opening of the Oscars broadcast. And I was sweating it.

It wasn’t missing the awards themselves that made me grouchy. They’d be handing those out all night.

It was the opening, the very first part of the show, where Billy Crystal puts himself in all of the movies and then sings songs about the best picture nominees.

It’s 6:05 now and I’m actively missing it. Luckily, we’d phoned ahead and my sister put a VHS tape in the machine and pressed record. But this meant I couldn’t watch it until the end of the broadcast, or else I’d risk missing more of the show.

Wild times, before modern technology.

Later that night, Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt both win the big acting awards for As Good As It Gets.

A few days from now in 2023, ten more people will sit nervously before two of them take the statuette for the 95th Oscars.

No developer products are nominated for Best Actor or Actress this year, of course. And they really shouldn’t be, even if they were eligible. If your product is the center of attention, it’s probably not doing its job to solve developer problems.

If there’s an acting statue worthy of developer products, it’s probably the supporting Oscars.

Your content needs to be a supporting role so that the problems—and the way you help uncover solutions—get the most attention.

It’s a delicate balance to allow the halo effect to reward your product. And so easy to slip back into promotional mode.

I’m about to do that promotion thing myself.

But for a very good reason:

I wrote a new book to help you and your team navigate the needs and wants of a technical audience.

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Technical Content Strategy Decoded helps you attract more of the right audience to your technical product.

It builds on the “education not promotion” philosophy and shows you exactly how to do it.

Like young Adam on Oscar night, you’ll have to wait a bit to see it yourself. It’s getting a final polish right now, but you can see the table of contents and share that with others. Maybe plan a book club with your team?

I don’t have a song medley planned for its announcement, but you can look back at what Billy Crystal did in ’98.

And the next time we see each other, ask me about it: thanks to my sister’s VHS, I watched that opening for years in the pre-YouTube era. I have it memorized.

“It’s… a… wonderful night for Oscar—Oscar, Oscar—who will win?”