Write the Docs Portland 2018
2018-05-06..2018-05-08
Portland, United States
[Write the Docs Portland 2018, Write the Docs Portland 2020, Write the Docs Portland 2021, Write the Docs Portland 2022, Write the Docs Portland 2023, Write the Docs Portland 2024, Write the Docs Portland 2025, Write the Docs Portland 2026]
who it's for
technical writers, documentation managers, content strategists, developer advocates, engineering managers, community managers
topics
usability testing for documentation; ruby nokogiri HTML scraping; documentation triage practices; code example polishing; choosing a doc platform; creating and running style guides; virtue based accessibility; hiring and onboarding junior writers; controlled vocabulary and dictionaries; swag and sticker design
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Building Empathy-Driven Developer Documentation | Kat King | 28m |
Twilio adds a lightweight yes/no pop-up then a custom ratings widget, runs nine one-on-one user sessions, wires low scores into Slack, and discovers… | ||
| Research Like You're Wrong | Jen Lambourne | 27m |
Advocates measurable hypotheses (for example “developer can install and configure in 3.25 minutes”), runs 5–7 participants per round because that finds 85% of… | ||
| Not the Docs | Havi Hoffman | 27m |
Claims that editorial work measurably scales developer outreach: Mozilla Hacks publishes 38 posts by 29 authors in four months and drives nearly 1.5 million… | ||
| Document Yourself | Erin Grace | 22m |
A practical playbook: a career starts with a one-page Word doc and survives layoffs (team drops from 25 to three people), so build reusable artifacts that… | ||
| Chopping up HTML | Wendy Shaffer | 05m |
Uses ruby and nokogiri to parse HTML/XML and automate extraction rather than hand-copying. Scripts turn a wiki table of 400 help ids into a CSV for import, and… | ||
| Lessons from My Career as an Educator | John Katora | 04m |
Three concrete practices: open each page with what’s in it for me because motivation predicts learning and people stop reading without that, stop catering to… | ||
| Functional Documentation Testing | Troy Howard | 05m |
Argues for measuring documentation by concrete outcomes not surface metrics, using user studies to record a time to competency (binary success plus minutes)… | ||
| The Sticker Talk | Heidi Waterhouse | 06m |
Stickers matter because specific details change behavior: a recommended sticker.how size spec makes hex stickers tileable, circles force wasted space, and… | ||
| How to Read Musical Time Signatures | Kenzie Woodbridge | 06m |
A time signature is presented as two pieces of data, not a fraction: the top roughly counts beats per bar, the bottom names the beat unit (4 = quarter, 8 =… | ||
| Rewrite the Docs! | Camille Acey | 18m |
Provides a concrete method: a three-step guide (limit scope, meet people where they are, document everything) used while actually rewriting a coop’s onboarding… | ||
| Who Writes the Docs? | Beth Aitman | 24m |
Asserts that documentation succeeds when responsibility shifts: developers testers product managers and support staff actually produce and maintain docs while… | ||
| Writing the Next Great Tech Book | Brian MacDonald | 27m |
Explains how tech book proposals actually win: pick a verb-focused scope and a tight audience, show market signals like GitHub stars or user numbers, and prove… | ||
| The Facts about FAQs | Ashleigh Rentz | 26m |
FAQs originate on Usenet as Q&A documents meant to cut repetition and they serve readers who want quick, task‑oriented answers rather than deep overviews… | ||
| Graphic Content Warning | Steve Stegelin | 21m |
Claims that visuals beat words (brain processes visuals faster) and that illustrations can improve procedural clarity 323% better; tools actually used include… | ||
| The art and practice of documentation triage | Neal Kaplan | 27m |
Concrete workflow named documentation triage organizes work: do a content audit, hunt internal wikis and support threads, tag items by value vs effort, and… | ||
| Starting from Scratch: Finding and Hiring Junior Writers | Sarah Day | 29m |
Pivotal launches an internship program inside a 15-person docs team across six locations to turn backlog into deliverables, recruits broadly (no CS or English… | ||
| Making Your Code Examples Shine | Larry Ullman | 28m |
Claims that code examples are auto-generated and manually generated using a Go utility generate-code-examples, that Stripe maintains a style guide and… | ||
| 7 Essential Tips for the Enlightened Tech Writer | Ted Hudek | 31m |
Seven concrete habits: just ask with examples of joining meetings and podcasts; listen for intent illustrated by a detailed MVP rant that gets solved with a… | ||
| What They Don't Tell You About Creating New Style Guides | Thursday Bram | 23m |
Notes give specific artifacts: a Responsible Communication style guide that began as personal mistake lists and a style supplement for Python; workflow advice… | ||
| It's Okay to Say No | Ben Fisher | 05m |
Argues for refusing work that has no measurable value: a reported context-sensitive help entry that documents a no-op setting, a rushed request to turn a… | ||
| Mutual Mentorship in a Rapidly Changing World | Ashley Newton | 04m |
Describes a repeatable process: send a single outreach email to an existing contact list to run an idea party and surface concrete next steps, which yields a… | ||
| Virtue Based Accessibility | Eric Nambs | 05m |
Claims that accessibility can be assessed and documented using only still images, by mapping WAI design patterns onto storyboard components to reveal actual… | ||
| Improving Response Rates | Kayce Basque | 05m |
Claim: embedding a feedback control inside the main content drives far more responses than peripheral widgets. Built an inline star widget with configurable… | ||
| Documentarians and Imposter Syndrome | Mo Nishiyama | 05m |
Claims that impostor syndrome is common even minutes before going on stage, that job titles don't determine who can write great docs, and that inclusion grows… | ||
| Everything you wanted to know about Toastmasters | Tana Franko | 04m |
Claims that Toastmasters turns a wall of terror into confidence by rehearsing a real conference talk over two months of practice at a nearby club that meets… | ||
| Controlled Vocabulary | Kristin McKee | 05m |
A controlled vocabulary is a living organized list that emerges from an audit of 600 pages of existing docs plus interviews with customers and visits to… | ||
| Choosing or Building a Doc Platform | Brian Dominick | 05m |
Defines a documentation platform as an end to end tool chain and compares MadCap Flare and FrameMaker style proprietary suites, wikis/knowledge‑bases… | ||
| What Writing Dictionaries Taught Me about Writing Documentation | Erin McKean | 26m |
Claim: a dictionary project becomes usable documentation when it pairs concise definitions with many real-world examples and lets users contribute. Evidence… | ||
| Audience, Market, Product | Bob Watson | 22m |
The central claim is that documentation success follows from diagnosing three concrete things — audience, market, product — and matching content to them: start… | ||
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