Write the Docs Portland 2022
2022-05-22..2022-05-24
-- 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, documentation managers, engineering managers, developer experience engineers, open source maintainers, localization engineers
topics
AsciiDoc and GitHub Pages; CI/CD for documentation; extract and transclude snippets with Bluehawk; executable code examples with Jest; runbooks and incident playbooks; measuring documentation success; pair writing and quickstart templates; content reuse and nested includes; web analytics pitfalls for docs; building and hiring docs teams; GitPod Frontmatter CMS Hugo sites
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Conference introduction and community update | Eric Holscher | 25m |
Land acknowledgment and a moment of silence open the meeting then organizers outline community rules: the Pacman rule (leave space to join) and the snowball… | ||
| One AWS team’s move to docs as code | Marcia Riefer Johnston, Dave May | 45m |
Team moves docs from Word to AsciiDoc in GitHub, uses GitHub Pages and CI/CD to auto-build HTML, separates docs into a doc-edits branch with its own pipeline… | ||
| Unit Test the Docs: Why You Should Test Your Code Examples | Ben Perlmutter | 49m |
Argues that code examples must be executable and kept as a single source of truth by extracting them from tests and transcluding into docs, using the realm… | ||
| Lessons Learned from Cloud Ops | Alastair Dallas, Shane Diven | 42m |
Run books explain exact steps, guardrails and verification for incidents at Splunk, with disk‑space and config alerts accompanied by executable code blocks and… | ||
| Measuring Documentation Success in Open Source | Kassandra Dhillon, Erin McKean | 29m |
Google’s Season of Docs 2021 changes include treating orgs as partners, funding projects with $5–15k grants, and asking orgs to pick metrics; program report… | ||
| Peer writing and beyond: An experimental approach to sustainable open-source projects | Chris Ganta | 37m |
Three writers pair-write a quick start template via weekly Slack sessions, using Google Docs for drafts then moving to visual studio code to build .md and open… | ||
| From Me to Us: Building a docs team from the ground up | Lana Brindley | 44m |
Built several docs teams that grow 4→13 and 2→9 and start from single-author to three-plus members; planning includes a hiring plan with… | ||
| Beating the Virginia Blues: Thru-hiking strategies for your next big project | Kate Mueller | 41m |
Argues the mid-project slump is normal and offers nine concrete tactics: plan for the slump, expect it, and measure results with daily journals and mileage… | ||
| Don't shoot yourself in the foot with content reuse | Anna Gasparyan | 34m |
JetBrains documentation teams explain reuse across a dozen IntelliJ-based IDEs, with about 20 technical writers sharing source and exposing four reuse… | ||
| Don't trust the numbers! | Kumar Dhanagopal | 45m |
Argues that web analytics help reveal user flows but often mislead: visit counts depend on cookies and timeout settings, time-on-page systematically… | ||
| All together now: Turning technologists into documentarians | Liani Lye, Gretchen Maciolek | 40m |
Three people start with a half‑hazard set of docs and in 18 months turn it into a serviceable platform website that consolidates scattered content under… | ||
| Code Cowpokes and Word Wranglers: from Mutual Admiration to Solidarity | Erin Dees | 47m |
Company Breeza renames the UI smart portal after docs find a lingering “binder” field, instruments usage logs to migrate customers off the old payload name… | ||
| Meetup information session - Get involved locally! | Rose Williams, Alyssa Rock | 28m |
Write the Docs meetup program explains concrete commitments and results: a coordinator team runs local chapters across North America Europe Oceania Asia and… | ||
| Global English: tips and tricks for simplicity and cross-cultural communication | Sarah Shockey | 05m |
Argues for specific practices: keep language tight, avoid idioms, and test copy with a non-first-language reader; the help center at help.showpad.com uses… | ||
| How to Give Bad News | Sarah Day | 05m |
Five minutes and a dozen slides give a playbook: two binaries—personal vs professional and written vs face to face—and concrete rules. Use active language: We… | ||
| Can I interest you in Empathy Advocacy? | Ryan Macklin | 05m |
Claims a practical new discipline called empathy advocacy that extends cognitive accessibility by translating neurobiology into a usable framework for writers… | ||
| I'm Make Technical Videos... Am I Still a Documentarian?! | Matt Reiner | 05m |
A company retools its YouTube channel, removed ad videos and fills it with Confluence how-tos that actually surface in Google, proving documentation lives on… | ||
| Sparking a conversation about climate-aware content strategies | Leanna Inzalaco | 05m |
A 60-person internal game at Antidotes generates dozens of practical ideas for lowering content carbon: five quick wins include content reuse to cut stored… | ||
| 5 steps to a great quickstart | Gayathri Krishnaswamy | 04m |
Five concrete steps claim to produce a usable quickstart: a five-step template that focuses the guide on the product’s hero feature, cuts install and setup… | ||
| The Zen of Technical Writing | Elisa Sawyer | 06m |
Technical writing frames itself as practice borrowing concrete techniques from Buddhist ideas: documentation treats change as impermanence, approaching new… | ||
| Marketing is not a curse word - 5 reasons to cultivate a closer relationship | Cynthia Harvey | 05m |
Claim: collaborating with marketing pays off. Concrete reasons include that marketing needs subject matter experts who can translate engineering detail and… | ||
| Marketing and Documentation Site with GitPod, Frontmatter CMS and Hugo SSG | Bryan Klein | 06m |
A concrete workflow: a GitPod config file boots a browser IDE with specified image and VS Code extensions, runs Hugo SSG’s dev server on port 1313, and opens… | ||
| Introducing the Broadcast Bike | Bart Buerman | 03m |
A compact cargo bike houses a portable OB setup with a laptop powering a multi-view feed, camera control and live cuts, and records multi‑camera streams that… | ||
| nothing matches | ||