Write the Docs PDX is joining forces with the great folks at Portland State University’s technical communications program on Thursday 11/21 to host a panel on technical writing and artificial intelligence.

Three presenters will discuss the current state of AI tools in the realm of technical documentation and where we might be headed as practitioners and professionals.

• Richard Coffey on writing with AI tools at Amazon Web Services
• Manny Silva, Head of Documentation at Skyflow, on the documentation pipeline of the near future. (Check out Manny’s talk at the Write the Docs Atlantic conference.)
• Bryan Schnabel, Digital Experience Manager at Verathon Inc., previewing his winter course AI Tools for Writers

This is a HYBRID EVENT! Location and Zoom registration are below.

Bring your thoughts and curiosities about this new paradigm in technical communications. It’s sure to be a thoughtful and inspirational supermeetup.

There will be time for questions and community (and snacks).

REGISTER FOR THE ZOOM MEETING

The Zoom starts a bit before 5:30 PM. Register in advance here: https://pdx.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0lcOyoqDIsGt1eQ0mnrigXHmoDXD6-Z6Sa

SHOW UP IN PERSON

Snacks and chats @ 5 PM Panel starts @ 5:30 PM

Please RSVP through Meetup if you're attending in person! 🙏

Email me with any questions or concerns!

[email protected]

Join us to to work on the Calagator User Guide. This is a great chance to learn more about the project and help out with an important task. Previous code sprint participants and newcomers are all welcome to contribute.

speaker: Ian Dees + Joshua Keroes

Ian...

➜ will cover what it's like for n00bs learning how to create a new Perl module, including:

• Where rookies look for "Getting Started" information
• Which tools we can readily find for the job
• What kinds of questions we have about namespaces

What Ian would like to do to help:

• Listen to your answers
• Format them into some kind of guide (or supplement an existing one)
• Hand it to a Perl expert to post in the right place
• Commit to checking in a couple of times a year to keep the information current

You will be vastly enlightened, or horrified.

Joshua...

➜ will continue down the Dist::Zilla path of Automated Enlightenment and speak on Pod::Weaver.

In July, Duke Leto gave Portland an introduction to Dist::Zilla, demonstrating how it can help write, package, test, and release your modules; automating the boring stuff like figuring out prerequisites, automatically inserting and updating $VERSION's, getting rid of all those meta files and generating them automatically; all good ways to focus on the important stuff: the code.

This month, Joshua will show how Pod::Weaver can help automate the boring parts of writing documentation so you can avoid getting bogged down by boilerplate and focus on the important stuff there: the docs.

As always, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab.

Write the Docs is a two-day conference focused on documentation systems, tech writing theory, and information delivery. It will be held on April 8-9 in Portland, Oregon.

Writing and maintaining documentation involves the talents of a multidisciplinary community of technical writers, designers, typesetters, developers, support teams, marketers, and many others.

This conference creates a time and a place for this community of documentarians to share information, discuss ideas, and work together to improve the art and science of documentation.

We invite all those who write the docs to spread the word:

Docs or it didn't happen!

Our meetup site.

Everett Toews, Developer Advocate at Rackspace Hosting, will share his experience using Git and Markdown to make it easier for the community to propose changes to their documentation. Please arrive by 6pm. I want to start sort of promptly, by 6:05. (I'll be there by 5:30.) The building entry doors will be locked at 7pm. I'll appreciate help cleaning up, so we can depart by 8:30.

A common complaint against many open source projects is documentation. Insufficient, incorrect, non-existent, hard to find, and difficult to update are things we typically all hear. There are a lot of different ways to tackle these problems. There's no silver bullet but one of my favorite tactics is lowering the barriers for absolutely anyone to contribute documentation.

Ideally, lowering the barriers means:

• using a common and well understood documentation markup language

• using documentation editors that are commonly available

• not requiring your contributors to install and configure tools

• providing a preview of the updates to make reviews reviews easier

Learn how Apache jclouds has enabled walkup contributions to our project documentation. We've benefited from better documentation, shorter review times, and building community through contribution.

The WTD NA conference is coming in May, so it's a good time to start planning for post-conference Meetups. We'll meet again on Tuesday June 9, when Diana Potter, the Senior Director of Customer Success at Customer.io tells us when to say: "Don't Write The Docs".

When I started working as a Technical Writer, our local VP told me that to do my job well, I'd spend significant time testing and pushing for changes to our software. To me, that sounds like the essence of Diana's talk.

Diana manages Customer.io's support/docs team. As such, I expect that her talk will interest Documentarians, Support Engineers, and Knowledge Base Creators. Here is the abstract of her talk:

Writing user facing documentation gives you a unique perspective on software. How does something work? Will the software explode when I push this button? Okay, now how do you explain that explosion to a user, in a way that makes sense and captures their attention?

What do you do, though, when that unique perspective illustrates areas of confusion? Why document something that's confusing? Fix the confusion!

Write the docs that make sense for the user and advocate for product changes on behalf of the "user" too.

How do you decide when it makes sense to document, and when it makes sense to dig in your heels and push for an internal change to the product? How can you use documentation to push for change? Come learn what I've learned, the processes I've put in place, and learn the following chant: "does this doc make sense?"

Hello! sildenafil , tadalafil ,

There will be 2 talks this month!

Rustdoc for Everyone:

You don't have to be a great writer to create great documentation. There are simple techniques and rules you can follow to build documentation for your users. Rust ships with documentation tools, but not all crates take advantage of them. Documentation is the first way that developers interact with your code - great documentation sets your crates apart, helps users skip easy questions, and cuts down on bug reports. In this talk, we will explore techniques for writing great documentation.

Speaker Jeremiah Peschka has been breaking software since 2000 - he's been told this sounds impressive, but he thinks it might just make him feel old. He blogs over at http://facility9.com and can be found on twitter and IRC as peschkaj. When Jeremiah isn't working with databases and Rust, he can be found playing video games, hanging out at food trucks, or napping at home.

Bridging Ruby and Rust:

Ruby is not the fastest language in the world, there is no doubt about it. This doesn't turn out to matter all that much – Ruby and its ecosystem has so much to offer, making it a worthwhile tradeoff a lot of the times.

However, you might occasionally encounter workloads that are simply not suitable for Ruby. This is especially true for frameworks like Rails, where the overhead wants to be as little as possible.

In this talk, we will explore building a native Ruby extension with Rust to speed up parts of Rails. What does Rust have to offer here over plain-old C? What kind of challenges would you run into when briding a dynamic langauge like Ruby with Rust? Let's find out!

Speaker Godfrey Chan is a member of the Rails core team and a co-author of Helix, a toolkit for implementing Ruby classes in Rust. He works at Tilde Inc, splitting his time between building Skylight and open-source consulting.

Other Information:

PDXRust meets on the first Wednesday of every month, from 6-8pm, at Mozilla's Portland space. The first hour is either lightning talks from group members or a more in-depth tutorial from a Rust expert, and the second hour is hacking and social time.

Join us in #pdxrust on irc.freenode.net (http://webchat.freenode.net/) with any feedback about what you'd like to see!

Remember that Rust's Code of Conduct defines the Rust community's expectations for participation.

NOTE: We'll be in New Relic's newest meeting room, on the 27th floor

The Write The Docs NA conference returns to Portland in May, and the deadline for proposals is February 10 (midnight PST).

For the third year, we'll give people who want to propose a chance to test things out, either by speaking briefly, or by brainstorming their proposals.

FYI, O'Reilly has an excellent guide to creating conference proposals, "Propose, Prepare, Present". If you navigate to http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920027096.do, you can get the eBook version for free.

We'll start with a brief networking session from 6-6:30.

At 6:30, I'll make a few announcements. Anyone who wants to try out a "preview" of a conference talk (5-10 min), or just present their draft proposal for comments, can speak to the group (or ask questions) after that.

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

Save the date! We'll give people who are scheduled to speak at the Write The Docs 2017 conference a chance to rehearse their talks.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Write The Docs NA conference returns to Portland in May. The call for proposals (http://www.writethedocs.org/conf/portland/2018/) was announced recently, and the deadline for proposals is January 10 (midnight PST).

For the fourth year, we'll give people who want to propose a chance to test things out, either by speaking briefly, or by brainstorming their proposals.

FYI, O'Reilly has an excellent guide to creating conference proposals, "Propose, Prepare, Present". If you navigate to http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920027096.do , you can get the eBook version for free.

We'll start with a brief networking session from 6-6:30. Note: Food will not be provided, but is available for order. At 6:30, I'll make a few announcements --

Anyone who wants to try out a "preview" of a conference talk (5-10 min), or just present their draft proposal for comments, can speak to the group (or ask questions) after that.

Join us to play a fun game that answers relevant writing questions with the hive mind, share highlights from the recent Write the Docs Portland 2018 conference, and enjoy light refreshments in a friendly and inclusive atmosphere.

Meetup information: https://www.meetup.com/Write-The-Docs-PDX/events/250814073/

Join us for this month's meetup and explore the topic of translation. Documentarian and translator Amy Coulter will lead us through the process of buying translations.

"Can't we just run this through Google Translate? Can't my colleague translate that, isn't she from that country? Can we just lob this over the fence to a big LSP and be done with it? Can we find a freelancer ASAP?
Local editor, translator and writer Amy Coulter will be happy to answer all of these questions for you (and more), giving you some tools for tackling a translation-related action item."

Join us for light refreshments and conversation. Please arrive by 6:15 as the doors lock after that time.

Erin Grace and David Bastedo had a chance to attend the Support Driven Expo conference in June and will be here to share their experiences and what they learned. Support Driven Expo is a conference that brings together customer support professionals to learn from each other and share best practices through talks, workshops, and unconferences. Learn more about how documentation plays a role in customer support and other trends in the support community.

Join us for light refreshments and conversation. Please arrive by 6:15 as the doors lock after that time.

We'd like to welcome Portland Accessibility and User Experience group (@pdxa11yux) as we host a joint meetup/workshop for writing more inclusively.

We’ll share inclusivity guidelines and tips, then break into groups and apply and share what we’ve learned. Together, we’ll uncover solutions to make your writing more inclusive. Please bring any burning accessibility comments or questions and any samples of relevant work you'd be willing to share and discuss.

Write the Docs Portland meetup, Portland State University's Technical Communication group, and PDX Support Driven meetup are combining forces for a very fascinating look into the lives of documentarians, Technical Writing students, and support professionals.

We'll have two members from each group share with attendees what their work day is like. After the "Day in the Life of..." stories, we have an opportunity to ask presenters questions and form breakout groups where attendees can converse with others based on common topics of interest.

Join us on Tuesday, October 16th, from 6 to 8 pm. Location: Smith Memorial Student Union building, meeting space room 333 (building map here: https://www.pdx.edu/student-union/building-directory#Third%20Floor)

Our December meetup features a presentation by Mike Jang (Senior Staff Technical Writer at ForgeRock), as well as several very important announcements for the community. You don't want to miss this!

Here's a teaser for Mike's presentation, "Minimum Viable Documentation for RESTful APIs":

To paraphrase a James Bond movie, "Swagger is not enough..."

...You've done the work to set up OpenAPI specification REST calls for your APIs (Inaccurately known as "Swagger"). You have reference information. But you discover that few users are actually trying REST calls on your system. You're wondering: "What else do I need?"

This presentation will describe the Minimal Viable Documentation (MVD) for RESTful APIs, also known as "What do I need for my developer portal?"

Based loosely on Kristof Van Tomme's presentations on Developer Experience, Mike will describe the MVD for a developer portal, what will help your developers try out your APIs.

Our January meetup (1/8/19, 6-8 pm at Jama Software) is an opportunity for members to share potential ideas for the Write the Docs Portland 2019 (May 19-21). Participants are encouraged to give short (~5 minutes) dry runs of potential presentations to gauge interest and collect feedback. Do you have a burning idea that you want to present at the conference? Here is your chance to share them. We'll also brainstorm topics that attendees would "love to see at the conference that they wish someone would offer."

If you have a talk in mind, please RSVP and let the organizers (Mo, Kristen McKee, and Mike Jang) know in advance. We would love to have several speakers share their proposals.

With Call for Proposals for the Write the Docs Portland 2019 conference quickly approaching (midnight, January 17th), this is a great opportunity to practice your talk and receive feedback. For what it's worth, several past participants of the Conference Submission Workshop were selected to present at Write the Docs.

We look forward to seeing you and hearing your ideas on January 8th!

Our February meetup will feature several short-length Lightning Talks by Write the Docs Portland community members. Instead of a full-length feature presentation, these Lightning Talks are short, focused topics that are about 5-10 minutes long.

Our presentations include: Kristen McKee: "UX RedUX: Words are design" Mo Nishiyama: "Docs of Ages: Lessons Learned in Evolving Support Articles" And others to be announced.

For users of DITA XML, the open-source authoring specification. The PDX DITA User's Group has been meeting for the last 7+ years.

We're holding an unprogrammed meetup for DITA practitioners, students, and the DITA-curious at the AppNexus offices near Pioneer Square. Come discuss current projects and future ideas over drinks and snacks.

Our next Write the Docs Portland meetup is on Tuesday, April 9th, at Jama Software. And we have an exclusive! We'll have an opportunity to hear one of the sixteen presentations that was selected for Write the Docs 2019 Portland conference!

Mike Jang will preview the "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Command Line" talk. The command line is not something that is to be feared, but an essential tool that can greatly aid software documentation.

For those who were unable to attend Write the Docs Portland conference in May, here's an opportunity to learn about attendees' experiences. And for those who attended the conference, here's an opportunity to reflect.

Each year, Write the Docs conference presents opportunities for community members to learn about challenges, experiences, problem-solving methods, and writing philosophies of fellow documentarians. Many folks in this community attend and participate at the conference.

Join us for a facilitated discussion where we reflect and share learnings from the May conference.

At our quarterly meetup for DITA XML users, we'll be welcoming Josh Johnson of MapR Technologies, who will be speaking about "The Doc Pipeline: The Awkward Teenage Years." Josh is a DITA tools developer with 15+ years experience enabling tech doc and content management teams to provide state-of-the art content creation and delivery. Ask him your questions about how he's supported doc teams in evolving their DITA implementations from simply up-and-running builds to highly efficient systems that support key performance goals.

--Meetup from 6:30-8:00 PM on 8/14, with the talk beginning at 7:00.

--There will be food, and drinks in moderation!

--Please RSVP to [email protected] if you plan to come in person--or if you'd like a call-in option. We always plan veg options, but can handle other requests with advance notice. Hope to see you there!

Hello Documentarians!

For the month of August, we're having a low-key, good old fashioned informal social. We're going to meet at Laughing Planet in NW Portland (very close to Beaverton), grab a table, and share our experiences as documentarians.

We've heard your survey feedback about your venue and date preferences, and we're going to try having community meetups in a variety of settings. For the month of August, we're going to meet in the westside--closer to Beaverton and Hillsboro.

Hello Portland (Oregon)-area documentarians! For September, we're going to have a Lean Coffee meetup (9/18 at Jama Software). Based on http://agilecoffee.com/leancoffee/, we'll leave the discussion up to you. As noted on the site, “Lean Coffee is a structured, but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and begin talking. Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda for the meeting was democratically generated.”

New to Lean Coffee? It's a great way to have real, focused dialogue and we often discuss matters of docs, agile, lean, and such - but anything goes.

Are you new to the philosophy of Documentation as Code (Docs as Code) and want to learn more? Do you want to learn from an experienced practitioner who has implemented Docs as Code in real-life? Are you interested in learning the benefits of Docs as Code?

Join us at Write the Docs Portland November meetup, as Documentarian Amy Qualls discusses these topics and more! A case study will be shared.

With the deadline for Write the Docs Portland 2020 quickly approaching on 1/10/20, this is a great opportunity to share your proposal ideas, conjure ideas for proposals, and support our fellow Documentarians who are submitting proposals. As Portland community has numerous past speakers and conference volunteers, this is a great opportunity to ask questions about the conference proceedings and the submission process. Plus it is a chance to reconnect after the holiday season!

This is an low-key, informal event at Laughing Planet (near Portland State University).

Additional information about the Call for Proposals is available here: https://www.writethedocs.org/conf/portland/2020/cfp/

KCS (Knowledge-Centered Support) is a methodology that brings together support and writing. In that spirit, February's meetup is a collaboration between the Write the Docs and Support Driven communities.

We'll hear Jack Harrison-Sherlock present on how Vend implemented KCS to a global team of 60 spread across 3 offices, doubling their self-service rate and empowering their team to contribute to a single knowledge base. Jack is the Senior Continuous Improvement Lead in the Support Operations team at Vend, where he owns the Support platform/tech and manages special projects.

• 6:30 to 7:00 Networking
• 7:00 Presentation

Joint Meetup with the Agile Mob Programming Workshop and Write the Docs

Mob programming is a collaborative way to leverage the strength of the collective developers to solve problems and produce code with results that can be greater than the work of the individual participants alone. But can mobbing work for tech writers? Join us in this social experiment to apply mob programming principles to writing documentation.

Mobbing works on the constraints created by the group. For this joint meetup, participants will be 100% remote.To join the meetup, please RSVP at Meetup link, and we’ll post a meeting link here on the day of the event.

As a group, we will be presented with a writing challenge. With these constraints, and any further agreements we make, we’ll use collaborative online tools to explore the benefits and challenges of docs mobbing.

Join us at the annual supermeetup for Write the Docs Portland and Portland State University Technical Writers' group on Wednesday 10/21/20. New tech writers and those who are curious about what others are doing are all welcome! #writethedocs

Write the Docs is a global community of people who care about documentation: Programmers, Tech Writers, Customer Support, Designers, Project Managers, Developer Advocates, and anyone else who wants people to have a great experience with software.

Created in 2013 in Portland, Oregon, WTD has hosted conferences around the world in Prague, Sydney, Amsterdam, London, and Melbourne.

We invite you to our Portland conference to join 400 other attendees to explore the art and science of documentation!