New Relic

NOVEMBER 6TH, 2018 PDX+RUBY

Come join us for talks and pizza on Tuesday. Socializing begins at 6:00, and talks start around 6:30.

This month: ELM AND RAILS & LIGHTING TALK(S)! This month we will have a presentation by Jerry Hilts about how Elm and Rails get along and at least one lightning talk by Chuck Vose.

NOTE: This will be a 90 minute *workshop*, and we may stay as late as 8:30 pm.

This workshop is an introduction to writing about identity in technology. Taught by the editor of The Responsible Communication Style Guide, this workshop covers how to write effectively, efficiently, and appropriately about topics tied to individuals' identities, including accessibility, gendered terms, and pronouns. It also covers how a style guide can be an effective part of the workflow when creating and promoting technology projects (including open source), writing documentation, and even developing software.

Bio: Thursday Bram is the editor of The Responsible Communication Style Guide. She writes about intersectional feminism, cryptocurrencies, kitchen sinks, and anything else that catches her interest. She organizes conferences, sticker swaps, and potluck dinners on a regular basis. You can find Thursday online at ThursdayBram.com.

Abstract

Many technical writers and documentarians benefit immensely after attending relevant conferences. These events offer networking opportunities, access to Subject Matter Experts, and impetus to pursue novel solutions to work conundrums.

The annual Write the Docs conferences offer glimpses of what is possible in my work environment. After Write the Docs NA 2017 event, I initiated several new projects/processes to elevate the state of internal communication, raise awareness for customer-facing documents, and organize tech communication community at work. The initial results have been encouraging.

We’ll explore how ideas from past and present Write the Docs events have acted as catalysts to overcome challenges and obstacles. We’ll also discuss why the conference is relevant for tech writers, regardless of their industry affiliations.

Bio

Mo Nishiyama is a Technical Writer at Oregon Health & Science University’s Information Technology Group. His professional passions include transforming dense engineer-speak into customer-friendly support articles, cultivating a community of tech writers in the workplace, promoting a human-centric work culture, and sharing career/life experiences through public speaking.

It’s understood that great documentation is essential to use software properly, but in a world with ever-changing specifications and hot new features, how can documentation remain fresh and easily accessible? We’ll discuss how New Relic has approached this, from the process of making sure the latest correct information is available, to updating the interface to make it easy for users to find exactly what they’re looking for, to analyzing our users’ habits and feedback to provide necessary tools and updates in the future.

We’ll take a stroll down memory lane to visit some of the early layouts of the documentation site,  and we’ll discuss the present iteration of the site and the UI changes that were made and why. We’ll also look into the future and provide a glimpse into what we can expect from the site in the months to come.

Speaker: Phil Mills
Software Engineer
Customer Success Enablement Team

With tens of millions of items in its collections, Internet Archive is one of the largest libraries in the world. It provides free and open access to all of its materials to anyone with an internet connection, making it a treasure trove for researchers, historians, and curious individuals.

Of course, having a collection that large doesn’t help anyone if it’s difficult to access. To help with this, Internet Archive has released a number of open APIs and tools to allow people to upload and download items, as well as data mine the metadata for the entire collection.

In this session we will:

Give you a tour of Internet Archive and its collections
Introduce you to the APIs and tools you can use to access and contribute to the Archive
* Show examples of how other people and institutions are using the Archive

Speaker Bio:

In VM (aka Vicky)'s nearly 20 years in the tech industry she has been an analyst, programmer, product manager, software engineering manager, director of software engineering, and C-level technical business and open source strategy consultant. Vicky is the winner of the Perl White Camel Award (2014) and the O'Reilly Open Source Award (2016).

Vicky occasionally blogs at http://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com, often writes and is a community moderator for opensource.com, and frequently tweets at @vmbrasseur.

Wacom -- a company which develops Pen Input hardware -- needed a user help system to move beyond static PDFs. Their solution was to separate product-specific PDFs into a series of, mostly common, HTML topic pages. These HTML file were, in turn, processed into a web deliverable package via Python scripting.

The solution is complex, as the Wacom system includes interrelationships between 150+ topics across over 30 products and 14 languages.

The solution required “a more technical Tech Writer” -- as it required knowledge of HTML
Python
JavaScript
Excel Macros

Wacom implemented their solution by integrating their tech writer in their Engineering team. They also included a dedicated engineering resource to support design and development of their technical docs.

Speaker: Arthur Krebsbach, Windows Software Engineer