Write the Docs North America 2016
2016-05-22..2016-05-24
Portland, United States
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction & State of the Docs | Eric Holscher | 20m |
Conference overview and logistics: 400 attendees gather for the fourth year with regional meetups (about 15, seven active) and roughly 1,500 meetup members… | ||
| Technical writing as public service: working on open source in government | Britta Gustafson | 30m |
Federal agencies adopt and adapt an open-source eRegulations platform originally from the CFPB and retooled for ATF and two more agencies, with the codebase in… | ||
| Two Great Teams: Bridging the Gap Between Documentation and Customer Support | Neal Kaplan | 23m |
Explains concrete steps to link docs and support: review support tickets and mine them for “how do I” patterns, set up automated notifications and tags so doc… | ||
| So You Need to Document an API? | Allison Reinheimer Moore | 30m |
Advice: treat API docs as three deliverables—conceptual, tutorial, and reference—and prioritize an authentication tutorial because first-call friction kills… | ||
| Crossing the Streams: Enabling Collaboration Between Products and Upstreams | Shaun McCance | 28m |
Describes how Red Hat enforces an upstream first workflow by making upstream docs reusable downstream, showing the Mallard topic system built for GNOME to… | ||
| Copy That: Helping your Users Succeed with Effective Product Copy | Sarah Day | 28m |
Argues product copy is actionable UX: classifying every string by what/how/why and using verbs-first buttons reduces confusion and support load. Shows concrete… | ||
| Write the Readable README | Daniel D. Beck | 23m |
Systematic review of 230 READMEs finds big failures and clear fixes: ~20% omit the project name, ~30% give no description, ~50% lack a homepage. The effective… | ||
| Continuous Annoyment: Bringing More Zen to a Hectic Writing Environment | Tana Franko | 15m |
A documentation team adopts a one‑word framing and a time management regimen to survive a continuous development product rollout, publishes content as data for… | ||
| Embed The Docs! | Kristof Van Tomme | 13m |
Argues that centralized manuals no longer keep up with rapid releases and short attention spans and proposes pushing help into the app itself, using specific… | ||
| Writing So Your Words Are Read | Tracy Osborn | 30m |
Argues that documentation wins when it targets real readers not clones of the author and gives concrete tactics: use human writing, add tutorials that handhold… | ||
| Transforming your Documentation Process | Leon Barnard, Zach Corleissen, Ted Hudek, Jon Bulava, Riona MacNamara | 59m |
A panel compares concrete rewrites of doc pipelines: an internal Google platform scales to 10,000 projects and drives doc changes alongside code; Balsamiq… | ||
| What Writing Fiction Teaches You About Writing Documentation | Thursday Bram | 30m |
Adapts Elmore Leonard’s rules into concrete doc guidance: avoid broad ecosystem intros, use simple actionable verbs, cut adverbs and excess punctuation, ban… | ||
| 7 Values of Effective Tech Writing Teams | Joao Fernandes | 21m |
Argues that the tech writer's goal is to help build products that need no documentation and lays out seven actionable values used at OutSystems and Docker: act… | ||
| Move Fast and Document Things: Writing internal docs at fast-moving organizations | Ruthie BenDor | 29m |
Describes concrete fixes: stop guessing and snoop for the real problem (tooling was fine; assumptions and scattered docs were the issue), pick one canonical… | ||
| We’re Not in Kansas Anymore: How to Find Courage while Following the Technical Doc Road | Christy Lutz | 13m |
Technical docs succeed through concrete habits: run a stakeholder whiteboard session (day two became a day-five goal), attend standups to capture feature… | ||
| CSAT - What’s That? | Betsy Roseberg | 16m |
New Relic ties CSAT to every public doc and uses the data to drive concrete fixes: 921 public docs each get a yes/no tally plus comments, a rotating one-week… | ||
| Just-In-Time Documentation: Employing Agile Methodology To Create Living Documentation | Brianne Hillmer | 26m |
Describes a concrete JIT workflow: support marks a ZenDesk custom field, a Zapier zap sends ticket data to a Google Sheet, docs author creates MVP article or… | ||
| Code the Docs: Interactive Document Environments | Tim Nugent, Paris Buttfield-Addison | 28m |
Compares two live-document environments and shows working demos: Swift Playgrounds (paginated Swift files with Markdown comments, live UI output, demoed with… | ||
| How to Publish Wild-Caught Articles | Sharon Campbell | 25m |
DigitalOcean curates community-written technical tutorials, publishing hundreds into a knowledge base of 1,300 tutorials. Submission vetting uses concrete… | ||
| Accessible Math on the Web: A Server/Client Solution | Tim Arnold | 15m |
A server/client pipeline converts LaTeX or MathML into three concrete outputs: SVG with embedded MathSpeak, raw MathML, and MathML rendered by MathJax… | ||
| Oops, I Became an Engineer | Tara Scherner de la Fuente | 16m |
A career pivot from English grad school and assistant dean to junior engineer at LivingSocial shows that writing skills transfer and that a short, focused… | ||
| Documentation with Human Connection | Hannah Gilberg | 30m |
Navis applies Peter Elbow’s methods to revive dense enterprise docs: an eight‑writer team with 10,000+ pages adopts free writing to force concrete connections… | ||
| My Information Experience Adventure | Daniel Stevens | 27m |
Atlassian moves technical writing out of QA into Design and redefines it as an Information Experience craft with an expanded team working on Bitbucket… | ||
| Monday Lightning Talks | Jon Manning, David "DB" Baumgold, Matt Ness, Rachel Whitton, Colin Torretta, Mo Nishiyama | 30m |
Yarn Spinner is an open‑source interpreter for the Yarn dialogue language used in Night in the Woods that runs from plain text for rapid edits; Lektor is a… | ||
| Tuesday Lightning Talks | Mike Jang, Elisa Sawyer, Kenzie Woodbridge, Jack Twilley, Laurel Nicholes | 24m |
Timeline: meetups grow from 2013 to dozens — showings now in Boise, Austin, Managua, Galway, London and Berlin — demo of creating a Portland meetup works live… | ||
| nothing matches | ||