Write the Docs PDX
or How I Fared at my First Conference All Alone Like a Real Grown Up Person
As the final piece of my Outreachy Internship with Systers, I was given a $500 travel allowance to attend a conference with a strong free and open software component that my mentor considered relevant. I chose Write the Docs 2018 in Portland, OR.
Write the Docs is an organization with meetups around the world, a website filled with resources for writing better documentation, and a prolific Slack org with tons of smart, friendly folks. They have two conferences a year, one in Portland and another in Prague.
I was pretty nervous about heading to a conference where I didn’t know anyone and am totally new to the field. Write the Docs Portland is in its sixth year and hosted about 400 folks, this proved to be a great number. I met new people everyday, but wasn’t overwhelmed by thousands of other attendees. I used to live in Portland and my familiarity with the area eased some of my general anxiety.
The first full day on the calendar is Writing Day. Attendees were asked to either bring a project to work on or jump into someone else’s Open Source project. We hadn’t prepared anything to work on for Systers, so I wandered tentatively over to the Write the Docs table. It was, of course, full of very nice, not-at-all-scary people. The table was split into two groups, folks who were interested in writing content and folks interested in fixing GitHub issues. I joined the GitHub group and got a massive list of broken links from the WTD’s website. I spent the rest of the afternoon chatting and fixing broken links. By the time I left, I’d managed 32 commits, met cool people, and learned more about how to GitHub. Not bad!
Since there were only 400 attendees, the organizers were able to create a single track with 16 talks over the two days, along with a handful of lightning talks, and room downstairs for an Unconference.
The Unconference was one of my favorite parts of the event. The sessions were a great opportunity to chat with new people about a pre-existing topic. Not nearly as anxiety inducing as I feared. One of the best Unconference discussions I attended was about working remotely. There was a really lively group of folks from all over North America discussing how to work from home, possibly with a globally distributed team, without becoming a hermit. Another one I enjoyed was just a few people who self identified as being “Junior Tech Writers” chatting about how we got into the field and what our goals were.
One of my favorite talks was “Research like you’re wrong: Lessons from user research gone rogue” by Jen Lambourne. Jen spoke about her work with the UK Government and how she’s spent a lot of time doing, mostly free, user research to ensure that users are really getting the information they need. It married two of my favorite topics, user research and post its.
Overall, the conference was an amazing experience filled with wonderful people that I failed to get contact information from (I’m really good at talking to people, but terrible at “networking”). I’m excited to take what I’ve learned back to Systers and continue improving our documentation!
