Write the Docs Community Update - August 2022¶
Hey there documentarians!
Eric Holscher here, one of the co-founders of Write the Docs. Filling in again for the newsletter team in August this year, we have a few updates from the community about what has been going on. Thanks again to Aaron for taking over the newsletter editor role, and thanks to Beth for doing it for the last few years.
We’re looking forward to seeing everyone online for our virtual Prague on September 11-13 in the CEST timezone. Tickets are still on sale until a week before the event, so grab yours now if you haven’t yet. We’re also getting excited about our upcoming virtual Australia conference on December 8-9 in the AEDT timezone. The Australia conference CFP is open until September 16 if you have ideas to present.
We had our third virtual Portland conference this year. It was another success with almost 600 people attending from all over the world. The videos from the conference are available online.
2023 Conferences¶
We are looking forward to the rest of our 2022 conferences, but we’re also starting to plan for 2023. We had hoped to do a hybrid event last year, but found the logistics quite difficult to figure out. You can read more in our 2022 virtual announcement about the difficulties we had with hybrid.
We know the community is slowly becoming more excited for in-person events as time goes on. The hope is to have events in 2023 that are valuable for both our in-person and virtual attendees, but we haven’t figured out exactly what that looks like.
We continue to work to balance the bandwidth of our organizing team, the accessibility that virtual provides, and the value from live human interaction that we all miss. We will have more announcements about our 2023 plans closer to the end of the year, but we appreciate all the support we’ve gotten from you all as we figure things out.
Slack update¶
Slack has changed it policy around free plans, starting in September we will have 3 months of Slack history. This will make the community a much more useful place for people who interact occasionally, allowing them to catch up on past conversations a bit more easily. We know some people wish we could pay for Slack, but we address Slack history limitations on our website.
We also wanted to take the time to show appreciation to Janine Chan and all our Slack moderation team. We are overjoyed at the helpful community that we’ve been able to curate on our Slack network, and they play a huge role in that. If you aren’t on our Slack, we hope you’ll join us and contribute to the many varied discussions happening each day.
Salary Survey¶
Our annual salary survey gathers data about salaries for people working in documentation and related fields around the world. Results of the 2021 salary survey are available on our website.
We continue to receive great feedback from members of the community that use this information to set expectations around salary with their employers. Leveling the playing field in employment negotiations is one of the best things we can do to help our community members, and we plan to continue working on this endeavor.
We’re hoping to launch next year’s survey here soon, but haven’t put the finishing touches on it quite yet. Watch the newsletter for updates in the coming months.
From our sponsor¶
This month’s newsletter is sponsored by Zoomin:
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Interested in sponsoring the newsletter? Take a look at our sponsorship prospectus.
Featured job posts¶
This month’s job postings are sponsored by JetBrains:
- JetBrains is constantly and desperately looking for technical writers who love development and developer environments and are open to new challenges.
- Come to work with us. We are the opposite of boring.
We also had the following featured job postings:
- Technical Writer, ESLint (Remote)
- Technical Writer, Payara Services Ltd (Remote)
To apply for these jobs and more, visit the Write the Docs job board.
Thanks¶
Thanks again for subscribing to our newsletter and for being a member of our community. We hope to see you soon at one of our online events, on our Slack, or continue to see you here via this newsletter.
You can always reply to this email if you have any questions or comments. Stay tuned for another newsletter update next month!
