Write the Docs Portland 2026
2026-05-03..2026-05-05
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
Write the Docs Portland 2026 is a conference for documentarians and everyone who writes the docs. Join us May 3-5, 2026 in Portland, Oregon.
who it's for
technical writers, docs engineers, content strategists, documentation managers, open source maintainers, developer advocates, developer tooling engineers
topics
decision-facing technical writing; documentation cleanup at scale; git worktree and reflog workflows; structuring docs around user progress; AI documentation auditing; LLM accuracy evaluation for docs; policy documentation for crisis response; onboarding and contributor guides; Jupyter notebook ecosystem; building API docs from support queues; automated linting with Vale rules; content management system migration
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Documentation Thinking Beyond the Docs: Lessons from Decision-Facing Technical Writing | Mary Elise Dedicke | 34m |
Documentation skills shift from explaining to justifying: clear claims, explicit comparisons, and tight structure win decisions. Concrete artifacts include… | ||
| How We Deprecated 500+ Articles: Cleaning Up Documentation at Scale | Aileen Mary | 31m |
A systematic, data‑driven cleanup retires 500+ articles — about 30% of the knowledge base — over 5–6 months using a three‑phase process: age filters, ticket… | ||
| The Git Commands I Avoided for 9 Years (and Why I Wish I Hadn't) | Sarah Deaton | 36m |
Avoids nine years of anxiety about branch juggling by actually showing that git worktree lets two live previews run side‑by‑side, demonstrates how a mistaken… | ||
| Monday Lightning Talks | Liz Argall, Jordan Cheung | 29m |
Five-minute spots tell what actually happened: a job search prioritization matrix that assigns 1–10 scores, tallies five–eight priorities and forces a… | ||
| The Most Human Documentation | Christian Miles | 35m |
An Open Source Vale.sh plugin distills Wikipedia’s "Signs of AI Writing" into 18 rules and runs deterministic linters rather than fuzzy LLM checks; edits are… | ||
| Pillars That Hold: Structuring Documentation Around User Progress | Annie Zempel | 34m |
Claims a small set of structural changes produces measurable outcomes: redesigning IA, migrating to a new content management system migration, and centering… | ||
| How to Win Docs and Influence Robots: Improving Robot Accuracy Through Better Docs | Sarah Lin | 30m |
Details: tracks the same user prompts across multiple LLMs (ChatGPT Gemini Meta etc), builds internal tooling called Project Mercury, measures results across… | ||
| "Chat, Are We Cooked?" Help in the Moment: Designing Policy Documentation for High-Stakes, Real-Tim… | Darlene ChaniMaya Postma, Darlene Chanatry | 35m |
A study with Partner streamers in December 2025 labels supporting docs “mushy” and prompts a redesign: build a friction spectrum (levels 1–4) to decide when to… | ||
| What I Learned Building an AI Documentation Auditor (And What It Found in 500+ Pages of Docs) | Rakesh Pasupuleti | 39m |
Built an AI auditor that continuously scans docs and it actually ran over 500+ pages across 100+ portals and finds concrete failures: deprecated code examples… | ||
| The Invisible Work: What It Takes to Be the First (and Only) Tech Writer on the Team | Alina Desiatnikova | 36m |
Creates API docs built from zero by mining the support queue for customer pain points, collaborators, and examples, then negotiates scope with managers and… | ||
| You Don't Need More New Contributors — You Need Onboarding That Actually Works | Busayo Ojo | 37m |
Projects lose enthusiastic volunteers at the Git wall and on “good first” issues that lack file paths, expected outputs, or step‑by‑step setup; invisible rules… | ||
| Tuesday Lightning Talks | Seonaid Welch, Jo Richards, Janet Houck | 35m |
Lessons land on practice: a Lipizzaner horse and Pluvinel’s dialogue turn into an argument that docs must transfer capability via the coaching Kata not just… | ||
| What the Data Shows When Docs Meet LLMs (and Why I'm Excited for the Future) | Ethan Palm | 31m |
Netlify platform data shows about 18,000 active doc sites and an upper-range of nearly 47% agentic traffic with a conservative 35% verified agent traffic… | ||
| Drops of Jupyter: An Exploration of the Notebook Ecosystem | Adam Michael Wood | 30m |
Jupyter remains useful but fragmented: Google Colab provides a ready execution environment while notebooks stay in Git repos; reviewnb and nbdime make PRs… | ||
| Writing the Docs when the Protocol is the Product | Alex Garnett | 35m |
A docs site rewrite launches as appproto.com, aiming to subsume the Bluesky docs by surfacing lexicons as an app catalog rather than an intimidating reference… | ||
| nothing matches | ||