Write the Docs PDX 2021: Main Stage, Day 1 Recap
It feels great to be back at a Write the Docs event.
The kick off
Write the Docs co-founder Eric Holscher was on hand to nervously welcome everyone. He honed his message of community and mandating an inclusive spirit since WTD 2019. Which matters: We’ve all born witness to the end result of systemic hate over the last year. WTD should always be a safe place for all.
Paid support? Makes sense to me!
It’s unsurprising that Eric and team are considering paid subscriptions to WTD.
Most of what makes the community great would remain free (like the Slack channel). The Herculean effort to manage overhead on ticket sales alone is worth emphasizing.
An optional, paid user base of dedicated members with the means to help keep the lights on is a prudent idea. And I bet there are enough of us documentarians who love this community to open their wallets. Keeping WTD around for the foreseeable future is reward enough.
Day 1 recap
Below is my brief, bulleted summary of the first day. All around excellent content.
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Always remember that it’s someone’s first time performing a technical action. A salient point from Jessica Garson’s talk on tutorials. We can lose sight of this when working on a doc set for admins and there are thousands of existing pages.
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Throw out your perfect plan. By far one of the best talks this year was from Daniele Procida. Why not organically write and create documentation? Docs are perfect organisms at all levels of completeness, like a plant or tadpole at each stage of growth. And there’s no such thing as complete. A controversial idea to management, PMs, and SMEs. His points resonated with the virtual audience: many cheers/hurrahs/words of praise. I plan to go over this presentation with my colleagues ASAP.
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Your doc strategy doesn’t happen: it matures. Sarah R. Rodlund suggests using maturity models to frame your processes. I’m not familiar with these models in my day-to-day. But as someone who’s working on content strategy, I need to fill in the gaps here.
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Don’t fear the API. Be fearless, says Rachel Stavchansky, when staring down the barrel of an API doc project. Your job is to help developers figure out what to do, why they should do it, and how to go about it. It doesn’t take an expert to be audacious and jump in.
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DOCX is XML? Vectors too? Many attendees typed “duh” when Swapnil Ogale reminded us that you can edit a Word .docx file in a basic text editor. The underlying content is XML! You can even do it with vector graphics. I’m filing away his talk for the future.
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Libraries are cool, of course. An amazing, fun presentation to end the day. Dr. Buttfield-Addison walked us through the history of libraries and library science. Interesting stuff that I recommend following up on at his website.
Update 4/28/21
- Here’s a link to my repo of raw conference notes, if you’re so inclined. Thanks!
