What is Writing Day?¶
Writing Day is modeled after the concept of “sprints” or “hackathons”, which are common in open-source software (OSS) conferences.
On the first day of the conference, Sunday, attendees are encouraged to bring and lead a project, or contribute to another attendee’s project.
The primary goal is to bring interested individuals into the same room, sharing their passions and aspirations while collaborating to develop creative solutions to solve a problem or issue.
If you have a project, we encourage you to submit it before the conference! This is a great way to build momentum and get other attendees excited to participate in your project. We’ll open project submissions in March. As usual, day-of projects are always welcome too - you’ll have the option to sign up onsite and announce it during Writing Day.
How to participate in Writing Day¶
Project Lead: You bring an idea, content, or OSS project to work on with contributors.
Contributors: You are looking to contribute to various hosted projects.
Here are examples of projects that you might see at the conference:
Open-source software documentation
General documentation writing
Best practices manual (for your company, or the world)
Resume, cover letter, and portfolio reviews
Blog posts
Tips and tricks
Great works of fiction
Love letters
The Documentarian Manifesto
Find specific examples on the Portland Writing Day 2023 project list.
Schedule¶
Date: Sunday, May 4, 9 AM - 5 PM
Writing Day is an all day event designed with flexibility in mind. Feel free to check out as many projects as make sense for you and your schedule!
Morning Session:
Welcome and overview
Project announcements: Leads give a 2 minute summary
Projects and co-working begins
Lunch Break
Afternoon Session
Project announcements: Leads give a 2 minute project summary, starting with the afternoon-only projects
Projects and co-working reconvenes
Writing Day ends at 5pm
Exact times to be posted on our Schedule page.
How to Prepare¶
Come with the following tools:
Laptop, tablet, or other device
GitHub account (you may also want a GitLab account)
Text editor of your choice for coding or content creation
Lead a Project¶
Leading a project at Writing Day is a wonderful opportunity to engage with documentarians from a variety of backgrounds, experience, and expertise. Their collective wealth of experience can upgrade your documentation and create a more inclusive project. This empowers all of us to work together to create opportunities for each other and bigger, better communities.
Tips to create and lead a new project effectively:
Provide a project overview with a specific focus or goals: Your overview is a 2 minute pitch that describes your project and clearly defines a focus area or goal.
Pre-label tasks and issues: Create a specific event label and label documentation tasks and issues. This empowers new contributors to find tasks that interest them.
Create a task filter: This helps contributors find issues more easily and see which issues have been assigned.
Clear onboarding: Ensure your ReadMe, contribution guidelines, or onboarding instructions are accurate and up to date.
Project experts: We recommend having 1-2 project experts on your project. We love our developer advocates, community managers, and subject matter experts! You’re welcome to ask for virtual reinforcements from your community as well.
Flexibility and understanding: Reminder that attendees may need additional info to be successful in onboarding to your project.
Submit your Writing Day before the conference: Projects submitted by April 23, 2025 are featured in our pre-conference blog post and email. Many attendees have shared that their curiosity for specific projects motivated them to attend. Project submissions open in February/March.
These are suggestions and not requirements. It is perfectly valid to show up to Writing Day, tell us about your project day of, and ask for attendee contribution! It’s been done before and it will be done again.
Contribute to a Project¶
Writing Day is the perfect opportunity to participate and learn about new projects and technologies. You are welcome to stay with one project all day, or project hop. Do what feels right to you.
Tips to contribute to a project:
Regardless of your experience level, you are welcome here! We’re excited to have you. Even if you feel you lack the right skills, experiences, or have never attended an event like Writing Day before, you’ll be surprised at how much you can contribute.
Explore our guide to writing documentation! Our beginner’s guide is designed to help you get started and spark ideas for how you can contribute to a project.
Ask questions! If you encounter challenges with new concepts and tools, you are in a room surrounded by friendly people from diverse backgrounds and experiences. You can always ask the Welcome Wagon or Registration staff and volunteers. We will help you connect with the right person!
View the project list. Check out the projects that have been submitted in advance. Keep in mind that some attendees choose to announce their projects during Writing Day itself, so these projects might not appear on the list in advance.
We’re excited to have another wonderful Writing Day!
Project List¶
Enhance Your Portfolio! Contribute to an Open Source Repository¶
Project organizer: Mike Jang, he/him.
While we’ve open sourced our enterprise documentation repository, we’ve done something different. We’ve set up Good first issues that do not require Git knowledge.
We love all types of contributions. Examples:
We have not completed our move towards “sentence case” in our headings
We are missing alternative text for a few of our screenshots
If you’ve never used git or if you’re already an expert, we welcome your contributions.
If you’re a technical expert, our Good first issues give you the chance to test our how-tos and tutorials! If you remember Manny Silva’s Docs as Tests, several of our Good first issues include testable procedures.
And we hope to have interesting swag!
Docs as Tests and Doc Detective: Help us test your docs!¶
Project organizer: Manny Silva, he/him.
Docs as Tests and Doc Detective are back at Writing Day and our goal is to test at least 10 docs sets! Does your project or product have a UI? APIs? SDKs? We can help you test them and keep your docs accurate.
Docs as Tests is a strategy for keeping docs up-to-date by treating procedures and code snippets as testable assertions of product behavior. You have the docs, so let’s get testing! By validating that documentation contents work as written, you can:
Prevent broken docs
Ensure consistent UX between docs and products
Build user trust
We want every writer to be confident in their docs. Come by our table, and we’ll help you set up Docs as Tests with whatever tools (like Doc Detective) or strategies (like unit testing code snippets) are appropriate. Establish a zero-trust relationship between your docs and product, catching bugs in both as you go.
