Almost None to Some: Driving DISQO’s Doc Culture as a Solo Documentarian¶
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Description
When I was hired at DISQO as a Technical Writer, the number of engineers was hovering around seventy, and there was just one of me. With numerous Google Docs and Markdown files strewn about and much to still be documented, it was critical to take consistent action to build up DISQO's documentation alongside our documentation culture. In my talk, I want to tell the story of how we went from almost no documentation to some documentation, and how I lead this as one person, imperfectly.
Some things I'll talk about:
- Why some documentation is better than none and how to move from almost none to some with limited resources
- Building our documentation tenets (Transparency, Improved Communication, Lower Barriers to Entry)
- How I engaged people involved in building out dozens of docs over three websites as the sole Technical Writer for a 70+ member engineering org
- Being comfortable with unfinished documentation
- How I established partnerships, found my place in the organization as our only Technical Writer, and started our Tech Doc Guild
- Technical writing as part of the engineering team, and training our less-technical members on our docs-as-code process
- Conference: Write the Docs Portland
- Year: 2021
