Write The Docs Portland 2018

Writing Day

Structured and unstructured contributions to documentation for free and open source projects and the Write The Docs website.

http://www.writethedocs.org/conf/portland/2018/writing-day/

Swag!!

Lots of Documentarians!

Main conference

• Single track conference in the main room both days
• Unconference in a separate room at the venue
• Job fair in the unconference space morning of day 2
• All talks in the main room were live-streamed, recorded and are online. They also had live transcription (in room only) by White Coat Captioning.
• Lightning talk videos are on YouTube
• Lots of photos by Kay Smoljak on Flickr

Talks - Day 1

• Building Empathy-Driven Developer Documentation – Kat King
• Research like you’re wrong: Lessons from user research gone rogue – Jen Lambourne
• Not the Docs: content and voice on a developer blog – Havi Hoffman
• Document Yourself: Practical Tips for a Low(er)-Stress Portfolio – Erin Grace
• Rewrite the Docs!: Field Notes from the Radical IT department – Camille Acey
• Who Writes the Docs? – Beth Aitman
• Writing the Next Great Tech Book – Brian MacDonald
• The Facts About FAQs – Ashleigh Rentz
• Graphic Content Warning: The Pros, Cons, and Alternatives to Screenshots – Steve Stegelin

Talks - Day 2

• Where do I start? The art and practice of documentation triage – Neal Kaplan
• Starting from Scratch: Finding and Hiring Junior Writers – Sarah Day
• Making Your Code Examples Shine – Larry Ullman
• 7 Essential Tips for the Enlightened Tech Writer – Ted Hudek
• What They Don't Tell You About Creating New Style Guides – Thursday Bram
• What Writing Dictionaries Taught Me About Writing Documentation (And What I Had to Unlearn) – Erin McKean
• Audience, Market, Product: Tips for strategic API documentation planning – Bob Watson

My takeaways

• Really healthy community
• Good code of conduct
• Well practiced at staging large events
• Not just about software docs!
• Open source projects are NOT a focus, but they are liked and promoted a bit
• Big meetup groups in major metros
• Portland, SF, Austin, Sydney, etc
• Event was great for networking
• Met people from large and small orgs; full time writers and folks who just dabble (like me)

Future events

• Write the Docs + Open Help Cincinnati, August 18-22 2018
• Write the Docs Prague, September 9-11 2018
• Write The Docs Australia, November 15-16 2018
• Write The Docs Portland, May 2019

Credits

• Welcome documentarians! by Write The Docs, CC BY-NC-SA
• More documentarians by Write The Docs, CC BY-NC-SA
• Grab some swag! by Write The Docs, CC BY-NC-SA
• Swag Table by Write The Docs, CC BY-NC-SA
• Group Shot 2018 by Write The Docs, CC BY-NC-SA

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Copyright © 2018, Bryan Davis and the Wikimedia Foundation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

All images are licensed CC BY-NC-SA, remove if adapting for commercial purposes.