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Write the Docs 2019 Community Update

Hey there documentarians!

The newsletter team is taking the month off, but that doesn’t mean the community is standing still. We’re sending out a (somewhat belated :D) update to let you know about a few things we’re working on while they take a much deserved break.

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone in Prague in a few days. If you aren’t able to make it, check out the our experimental livestream of the event and join us in #live-streaming channel on Slack.

We’re also getting excited about our upcoming Australia conference in Sydney on November 14-15. The speaker list will be announced soon and the conference is coming up in a couple months, so start making your travel plans.

Lastly, we’ve also announced the dates for the Portland conference next year on May 3-5, 2020. The sponsorship prospectus and a landing page are now online, with more updates on that conference in the coming months.

Salary Survey

The thing that we’re most excited about is our new Salary Survey. Our goal is to get a clear idea of the pay scales and benefits in the software industry around documentation. Publishing the anonymized results for free will help people get a better understanding of what an appropriate salary is, and negotiate a better one.

The survey is 21 questions broken up into 4 parts and all questions are optional if you aren’t comfortable answering them. You can fill it out here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/wtd-salary-2019 Please consider sharing it with your network and on social media, as the more data we have the better it is for everyone.

The salary will be open until October 31st, 2019, after that we will process the data and publish the anonymized results.

A US East Conference

We’re starting to plan another US conference in 2020. We want to make this one somewhere closer to folks on the east coast, but we haven’t figured out exactly where to host it yet.

Currently we’re in the process of trying to find suitable venues. There are more details in our request for venues. If you know of a good venue that you think would work well for a Write the Docs conference, please let us know!

Community Interviews

We have finished up the summer internship that we ran this year with Mohit Patel. We now have 13 interviews with people in the community sharing their job history in the industry, as well as suggestions for folks who are just getting started.

We’re excited to have this resource available for people who are hoping to get into the industry. It’s often hard to understand how to get started, and having so many different stories and backgrounds really shows there isn’t a “proper” path, but many different ways.

Meetups

We’re almost at 50 meetups now, including a newly created remote meetup! The kick-off event was a few days ago, and we’re eager to hear how it went.

Speaking of remote events, on October 7th, Deborah Barnard and Lorna Jane from our North England meetup are running a virtual docs hackathon as part of Hacktoberfest, more info at https://www.starfallprojects.co.uk/blog/hacktoberfest-2019/

Also noteworthy is the search for both a San Francisco lead meetup organizer and a Bay Area meetup coordinator. If you’re in the area, and attend meetups regularly, maybe you’d like to find out a little more about what is involved? https://www.meetup.com/Write-the-Docs-Bay-Area/

Thanks

Thanks again for subscribing to our newsletter and being a member of our community. We hope to see you in person soon at one of our events, or continue to see you online 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!

Announcing speakers and talks   Highlights and thanks from the Prague conference