Write the Docs Portland 2025
2025-05-04..2025-05-06
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]
as the organisers put it
Portland 2025 Recap - Talk Videos, Photos, Sketchnotes, CoC Report- May 14, 2025, Welcome to Write the Docs Portland 2025!- April 28, 2025, Only 1 Month Until Write the Docs Portland- April 03, 202...
who it's for
technical writers, documentation engineers, docs managers, developer experience engineers, support engineers, localization engineers
topics
Discourse to Jira feedback workflows; docs toolchain migration (Sphinx to Hugo); medical device MDR and IFUs; mkdocs + Material and plugins; docs as tests with Playwright/Cypress; RAG chatbot for docs with citations; XSLT migration into Antora; CI/CD for docs sites (GCP + Jenkins); single-source monorepo for docs; competitive analysis for documentation; community PRs for open docs; translation workflows and 28 languages
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Quest for the Holy Grail: Turning User Feedback into Meaningful Change | Rachel Rigdon | 39m |
A documentation feedback system links 7,500 doc pages to a Discourse topic excerpt and routes comments via automated Discourse → Jira workflow, producing… | ||
| The Power of Two: How Support and Docs Teams Transform Technical Content Quality | Yanjie Niu | 38m |
A practical, repeatable framework pairs support case data with docs expertise to prioritize and ship content changes on a quarterly cadence, delivering two… | ||
| Regulate This! Writing for the Medical Device Industry | Holly Mickelson | 39m |
Brainlab documents 800 products and about 300 instruments with a six‑person team totalling 75 years’ experience and an error‑logging workflow; authoring uses… | ||
| Writing the Shipwreck | Stephanie Fuller | 40m |
Walks into an actual documentation shipwreck with an obsolete Gitbook CLI deprecated toolchain, broken HTML, missing style and review processes, and no… | ||
| Seven habits of increasingly technical technical writers | Janine Chan | 38m |
Seven concrete habits land as actionable moves not platitudes: teach yourself how to learn, avoid saying “I am not technical” and instead say “I can’t do this… | ||
| Embracing the Kraken : How to build a docs-toolchain monster and why it’s OK | Ravind Kumar | 41m |
Min.io documentation grows from a Sphinx-based site into a tangled toolchain: a custom Sphinx directive stuffed with 300 debug print statements, bash scripts… | ||
| Docs as Tests: A Strategy for Resilient Docs | Manny Silva | 38m |
Claims that docs become testable assertions and that automated checks keep docs in sync with product behavior Tests include UI screenshot capture and visual… | ||
| Docs AI Tooling is Better (and Better for Us) than You Think | Alex Garnett | 39m |
Shows a working Kappa RAG chatbot wired to docs Slack courses and GitHub that serves about 3,000 queries/day and 14,000/month while flagging answers as… | ||
| Knitting Together a Technical Writing Career | Heather Zoppetti | 39m |
Claims that knitwear pattern design is a form of technical writing, backed by concrete work: a competitive analysis–driven pattern line, hundreds of patterns… | ||
| Unifying Documentation: A Tale of Two Security Giants | Jodie Landes | 39m |
Migrated 48,000 pages in 10 months by running an XSLT conversion script into Docs as Code + Antora and bundling dependencies so writers install once and… | ||
| Scaling a unicorn: how to mature your docs program and support a changing business | Elise Davis | 38m |
Company grows from ~350 to ~1,600 people while docs expand across six products and team size moves from three to nine writers; 300 FAQs get converted into the… | ||
| Using Competitive Analysis to Your Advantage | Leah Catania | 39m |
Argument: a methodical competitive analysis wins stakeholder buy-in by showing concrete examples, not opinions. Process: set a written goal and scope, pick 4–8… | ||
| Open Docs, Open Collaboration: Building Better Documentation with Community PRs | Colin Loretz | 39m |
Public docs live in a GitHub repo of about 200 markdown files and receive roughly 30 to 50 PRs a month, with more than half from the community. Workflows use… | ||
| Lightning Talks Day 1 | Zaz Linkous, Kate Mueller, Niko Berry, Liz Argall, Tom Johnson | 28m |
Game-design lenses show how to scaffold learning from safe to hard using deck of game design and city-planning ideas (nodes, paths, landmarks); structuring… | ||
| Lightning Talks Day 2 | Jennifer Evans, Michelle Knight, Ashley Gordon, Jewel Darger-Sacher, AK Krajewska, Dennis Dawson | 30m |
Short bursts land on concrete takeaways: a first live patient surgery story about choosing quality of life over fear; a claim that documentation as governed… | ||
| nothing matches | ||