Rabiah Khanum: Wired to Write: A Pakistani Engineer’s Journey into Tech Writing

Where It All Began

Hello, I’m Rabiah Khanum from Pakistan. My story is an unconventional one for a Pakistani. I graduated as an electrical engineer with a major in communication in 2024, and technical writing was my first unexpected step into the corporate sector. Ever since I was a child, I have loved reading and writing. However, during my engineering degree, that passion was put on a back burner since my studies required being hands-on with numbers and circuits, unknowingly building the technical foundation I would later bring to my writing.

A Different Path

Most electrical engineering graduates go on to either the power sector or telecom engineering sector here in Pakistan, and as a fresh graduate in 2024, my plans were also quite similar. Like many other fresh graduates, I faced the all-too-familiar struggle of job hunting in the age of AI. I applied to a lot of engineering roles, but little did I know my path was to be quite different. Three months after my graduation, I got accepted for a technical writing internship opportunity at Xgrid, which I applied for on a whim and only because reading and writing had always fascinated me. Later, I was onboarded as a junior technical writer after a comprehensive evaluation during my internship.

Entering the world of technical writing completely changed my perspective on the field, from simple written reports in university to a comprehensive documentation system at my job. My expertise is mostly in computer networking, since that was one of my major subjects in my final year of bachelor’s and my first client at Xgrid. Later, I also delved into data analytics and documenting tools such as Power BI and Tableau and explained HubSpot and marketing automation workflows to users. It was a wild blend of everything, since I am a big learner and always curious about new things and tools.

A World of Its Own

Entering this field, I learned about docs-as-code and all the different technologies. At Xgrid, I had to work with entirely new tools, including Sphinx, HTML/CSS, and Confluence. I came to know how tech writing is a complete world of its own. I learned how much thinking is involved in the creation of each documentation asset and how coding plays a big role in rendering docs and embedding them in software tools. For instance, I built a Python pipeline using GitHub Actions that automated the entire reStructuredText file creation process, cutting what used to take days down to just minutes.

Connecting Beyond Borders

Since there are very few tech writers in Pakistan, scattered across the country with no formal community yet established, I turned to LinkedIn to connect with professionals from around the world and learn from them. Most of these professionals were specifically from the US since all our clients were from there. I joined the Write the Docs community and learned that the tech writing community is very welcoming and open to newcomers.

Since I was new to the corporate world as well as the technical communication industry, I set out to interview senior professionals and learned that there are so many industries within tech writing, and they each use a horde of different tools according to their requirements. Every senior professional I encountered encouraged me and made me realize how brave it is to work in a team with only two tech writers.

My most fun experience was interviewing a senior technical writer from Serbia and learning how she works with enterprise clients. Later, we posted the complete interview on Xgrid’s YouTube channel. Along similar lines, I was invited to appear on my friend Diana Payton’s YouTube channel, Technical Writing Uncensored, sharing my one-year experience as a newbie in tech writing. She’s one of my USA connections.

Embracing the AI Wave

All in all, tech writing has been a challenging and fun field to step into, and I was one of those newcomers who stepped into it in the thick of the AI boom. It’s safe to say that I love experimenting with AI, and vibe coding has taken me very far. It has helped me build my portfolio from scratch, tweak Sphinx themes to make custom ones for clients, and contribute to an open-source tool that ultimately cut down our manual doc conversion time to minutes. The conversation around AI and tech writing has been constant since the start of my career, and while the debate continues, I cannot deny that AI has contributed greatly to my self-learning. Especially since I was not physically surrounded by many tech writers and had to carve my own path independently.

The Road Ahead

Two years have taught me a lot. Yet I still believe there is much in store for me. My future plans include doing a master’s in communication systems engineering and contributing to documentation as much as I can, whether that be open source or with other clients like the ones I worked with at Xgrid.