As a former C++ developer, I can safely say...'I feel your pain'.. :-)
I'll be happy to help with the help file of The Regulator... let me know..
I'm starting to appreciate that technical writing class I had to take in college. I guess that's one benefit of getting a CE degree (that's Civil Engineering, not Computer Engineering).
If I had more free time I'd give it a shot but I'm already working way too much for my wife to tollerate me doing freebie work on the side. Sorry.
Thanks for your honesty...and respect. As HP info engineer (what they called tech writers) John Bowie from Colorado says, "Software engineers code for the CPU, but information engineers [read: technical communicators] code for the human mind." And fo us humans, it's not either/or, in/out, 1/0...it's more "it depends."
Another key task, of course, is to know your users. Find out what your users really need, by watching them attempt to do their jobs. Watching users is the best input you can get to determine what to write.
Best of luck!
joe
Joe Sokohl
facetime.blogspot.com
As a technical writer, I share your pain. Writing Help files can be challenging. It not only can be tough trying to deciding how to filter the information you want to include in online Help (just dumping a user manual into a Help format is the lazy way out), but it's also tough to massage that information so that it's not too verbose or too sparse.
It takes time, it takes practice. And, even then, it's not always that easy.