Code Cowpokes and Word Wranglers: from Mutual Admiration to Solidarity¶
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Description
Collaboration with tech writers, from a developer's perspective
We've all been in workplaces that kept engineers and documentarians siloed. We've suffered under time pressure, different tools, and even explicit directives for each group not to "bother the others." The result is software projects and documents that drift out of sync—not to mention frustrated collaborators all around.
But many of us have seen glimmers of hope, too. We've seen environments that foster sharing across disciplines. We've worked with engineering teams who seek out ways to contribute to the docs. Even better, we've seen software massively improve because of the docs.
In this talk, you'll hear stories from the field from an engineer's perspective: team structures that have made collaboration natural, features that we changed because the docs proved them unusable in their current form, and how we're making documentation part of the software development process from the very beginning.
We'll finish with ideas on how you can make this kind of collaboration part of your culture, part of your reward structure, and part of your team design.
- Conference: Write the Docs Portland
- Year: 2022
