Write the Docs Portland 2020
2020-08-09..2020-08-11
-- online --
[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, docs engineers, content designers, localization managers, developer advocates, engineering managers
topics
accessibility practices for docs; translation memory and localization; migrating docs to new tooling; creating quality sample code; Jupyter notebook interactive tutorials; pandoc and XeLaTeX CI builds; model-based architecture diagramming; structured-data documentation; documentation as interactive application; SDK documentation best practices; search and intelligent search; content strategy and collaboration
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | Write the Docs Portland | 33m |
Conference moves online as a working experiment: talks stream on Hopin with a moderated Q&A, live human captions by Vanessa, and Google Sheets running the… | ||
| Moving beyond empathy: a11y in documentation | Alexandra White | 37m |
Argues that empathy alone is insufficient and documents must use concrete accessibility practices including semantic HTML, matching alt and aria text to… | ||
| Globalise the docs | Lucy Carey | 47m |
Argues that translating English docs needs concrete choices: use humans for boutique copy, leverage translation memory (CAT) tools to speed work, and use… | ||
| Writing Backwards: Documenting the End-of-Life of a Product | Anni Bond | 30m |
Manages the documentation for the end of Red Hat Network and the migration to Red Hat Subscription Management and shows concrete steps: a phased shutdown: UI… | ||
| Read the Rules: What technical writers can learn from board game design | Matthew Baldwin | 48m |
Compares rulebooks like Wingspan that separate a short how-to-play and an appendix reference and teach from general to specific, shows step-by-step setup… | ||
| Impactful writing during the pandemic | Nick Van der Auwermeulen | 06m |
Documentation and processes enable rapid scale up of a COVID testing program by turning ad hoc practices into repeatable operations using standardized… | ||
| Hieroglyphic: visual annotations for code | Ayman Nadeem | 05m |
Claims a concrete prototype called hieroglyphic that embeds hand-drawn diagrams and markup as layers for code files inside the IDE, combining static analysis… | ||
| Collaboration is scary and makes us better | Matt Reiner | 05m |
Says using Confluence and live editing makes work visible and sometimes terrifying but ultimately better, argues collaboration produces more robust outcomes… | ||
| Creating Quality Sample Code | Jessica Garson | 28m |
Creates GitHub-hosted samples for Twitter Labs with a focus on short, modular, runnable examples that actually work and get maintained. Uses a Postman… | ||
| Building a content-focused, scientific document authoring workflow | Colin Dean | 30m |
A reproducible authoring workflow based on pandoc + XeLaTeX build and git produces a versioned PDF artifact built by CI (Drone) and Make, created in about two… | ||
| Don't Fear Migration! How to Successfully Move Docs to a New Tool | Brooke Wayne | 27m |
Company moves a messy support wiki into a neutral docs tool after finding agents spend 13% of their time hunting answers and only 3% of pages actually help… | ||
| Where Docs, Cloud-hosted Interactive Tutorials and CI Testing Intersect | Dan Gunter | 19m |
Uses Jupyter notebooks as single-source examples, with Sphinx to render docs, a separate GitHub repo for examples, and a lightweight CLI that fetches examples… | ||
| Finding the line: Balancing business continuity and documentation debt | Luca Janssens | 43m |
Argues that documentation debt is a distinct, long‑term problem born of rapid delivery and that balancing it with documentation continuity requires treating… | ||
| Collaborating w/teams on content strategy planning: pitfalls & best practices | Kateryna Osadchenko | 42m |
Argues that success hinges on specifics: establish clear communications up front, schedule regular touchpoints, and decompose work into visible chunks with… | ||
| Model-view-docs: taming large-scale documentation projects using structured data | Luc Perkins | 43m |
Argues that data-driven documentation makes large, changing docs maintainable by separating structured sources (JSON/YAML) from templates and automating… | ||
| Set your data free with model-based architecture diagramming | Avi Flax | 45m |
Claim: de‑confounding content from presentation — keep the architecture model separate from the visualization so one source of truth drives many views… | ||
| Documentation as an application: enabling interactive content tailored to the user | Ryan Paul | 42m |
Stripe reworks docs into an app: a React front end, a custom markdown superset called markdoc, and a ruby proxy that supplies primitive context variables… | ||
| Write great learning objectives to power intelligent search | Adrian Stevens | 06m |
Claims that hands-on interactivity increases transfer and automaticity and that practice produces retention and demonstrable experience. Evidence includes… | ||
| Can we (sometimes) go back to print documentation? | Julia Evans | 04m |
Argues that some core documentation is stable enough to justify physical publishing: a solo publisher called wizard Zen condenses big topics into 24-page… | ||
| When grammar rules matter, and when they get in the way | Janine Chan | 05m |
Presented at Write the Docs Portland 2020 virtual conference, the claim centers on choosing descriptivism over prescriptivism: keep style guides as a tool but… | ||
| Emotional personas: another way to think about your users | Ryan Macklin | 01m |
A five‑minute slide deck claims a practical taxonomy: five emotional personas named after animals that map user emotion to content needs, presented as anxious… | ||
| Walking Backwards: New Customer Journey from Finish to Start to Help Shape Content | Sally Stumbo | 36m |
Audits of new-account support cases start from the end result and reveal concrete fixes: July 2019 sampling filters ~1,000 cases down to 76 cases filtered… | ||
| The Search for Search | Paul Logan | 37m |
Adds a site search to api.slack.com by indexing a unified catalog of docs and calling the Algolia REST API from the monolithic Hack/PHP codebase, not using… | ||
| Why SDK Docs Matter — And What I’m Doing About It! | Shavindri Dissanayake (Shavi) | 34m |
Users land on Github and confuse similar client libraries so 25 sdks produce wrong choices; solution creates a per‑sdk table of sdks, a visible decision… | ||
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