Writing Day

Writing Day

Each year we run an event called the Writing Day during the conference. This event is modeled after the concept of sprints, which are common in open-source conferences. The main premise is to get a bunch of interesting people in a room together and have them work towards shared goals.

To make the most out of the Writing Day, we recommend that you either come with a project, or be ready and willing to contribute to someone else’s project.

Here are some examples of projects that you might want to work on:

  • Open source software documentation
  • General documentation writing
  • Best practices manual (For your company, or the world)
  • Blog posts
  • Tips and tricks
  • Great works of fiction
  • Love letters
  • The Documentarian Manifesto

You get the idea.

All this adds up to a room full of smart people sharing your problems, your passion, and your goals. So be ready to learn some new things and to teach others what you know.

Even if you feel as though you don’t know that much, we know you have a lot to offer. Come surprise yourself with how much you can share.

Documenting a new project?

Check out our beginners guide to writing documentation. This should help you get started, and give you some ideas for how you can contribute to a project that you love.

Logistics

Please bring a computer or some other mechanism with which to create written words. We’ll be creating and editing content, so make sure that you have the tools you need to contribute.

Schedule

  • Date & Time: Sunday, May 7, 9am-5pm Pacific Time.
  • Location: Library & Astoria room (Bottom floor).

Exact timing information is available on our Schedule page.

During the conference

Check out the Writing Day Cheat Sheet for a quick reference that you can use during the conference to make the most out of Writing Day.

Submit Your Project

We encourage attendees to submit projects for Writing Day in advance. You are more than welcome to bring a project, and announce it during the actual Writing Day.

Project Listing

Here are some of the projects that you can work on during Writing Day!

Doc Detective

Meet the Team, Test Your Docs, and Contribute to Ours.

Doc Detective is an open-source documentation testing framework that aims to make it easy to keep your docs accurate and up-to-date. You write low-code (soon no-code) tests, and Doc Detective runs them directly against your product to make sure your docs match your user experience. Whether it’s a UI-based process or a series of API calls, Doc Detective can help you find doc bugs before your users do.

Doc Detective supports tests in Chrome and Firefox today and plans to support tests for native iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux applications in the future.

Our documentation (and source code) is available on GitHub, and anyone can contribute it:

  1. Take a look at the issues labeled “writing day”.
  2. If you don’t find something you’d like to work on, view all issues labeled “documentation” or browse the docs and find something else you’d like to improve (and log it in a new issue).
  3. Once you find the issue you want to work on, add a comment mentioning @hawkeyexl to inform us that you’re working on this for Writing Day (and tell us in person!).
  4. Create a pull request with your proposed changes.
  5. Once your pull request is reviewed and merged, it will appear on the docs site shortly!

Stop by to chat and build some tests for your docs. If you have any questions, you can reach out to us in person or on Discord.

Read the Docs

Read the Docs is an open source hosting tool, mostly focused on Docs as Code. This sprint will give you a few options:

The documentation is written in Sphinx & reStructuredText, but you can try out your own project using any framework, as long as it’s open source.

Your Project Here

Send us a pull request or an email and we will add it to this site.

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