Write the Docs Podcast
Podcasts for the Write the Docs community. Mostly focused on tech comm, tech writing, UX, IA, and more.
Episodes
July 26, 2025 • 57 mins
In this podcast, we discuss the newly released book Docs for Developers: An Engineer's Field Guide to Technical Writing with Jared Bhatti, staff technical writer at Google, and Zachary Sarah Corleissen, staff technical writer at Stripe (two of the co-authors). This book on writing documentation focuses on the end-to-end writing process (from audience analysis to drafting, editing, publishing, and more) and is writt...
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July 26, 2025 • 43 mins
In this podcast, Fabrizio Ferri joins us for a discussion about adding both personal identity and personality to documentation. Why are the docs we write so often anonymous, and does that anonymity work against progress in our careers? Are tech writers, who are typically introverts, averse to publicity, or does our industry not allow for it? And if you want to be a "personality" in the tech communications world, wh...
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July 26, 2025 • 58 mins
One of the most challenging and frustrating things about being a tech writer is managing screenshots in your product documentation. How many times have you needed to take complex screenshots of your product and meticulously marked them up with callouts only to be told that a field has changed and you need to do everything again? It’s so frustrating and demoralizing as a writer because it feels like wasted effort. W...
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July 26, 2025 • 54 mins
Many tech writers are familiar with using AsciiDoc for documentation, but did you know that you can also create fiction and non-fiction books with AsciiDoc, publishing to popular digital formats such as EPUB or PDF, along with HTML? In this episode of the Write the Docs podcast, we chat with Mehmed Pasic from Manning Publications about self-publishing, AsciiDoc, collaborative workflows between authors and editors, ...
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July 26, 2025 • 60 mins
So many documentation websites rely on search as part of their information architecture. But what do you actually need to consider if you want to make your site search return answers for users in relevant, efficient ways? Join Peter Levan from Funnelback with regular guests Chris, Jared, and Tom for a talk all about making search work well on your site. Some of the questions discussed include: Why can't you just le...
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July 26, 2025 • 61 mins
In this episode, Juan Lara from Google joins us for a lively discussion about documentation templates. Documentation templates refer to established patterns we follow for common documentation types, such as quickstarts, how-to guides, concepts, tutorials, reference, troubleshooting, release notes, FAQs, or other information types that have similar, predictable patterns. Templates can be helpful in orienting new wri...
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July 26, 2025 • 56 mins
In this episode, we chat with Eric Holscher, co-founder of both Read the Docs and Write the Docs, about the recent Salary Survey that the WTD group conducted. This survey was launched in Fall 2019, and the results published were recently published. The salary survey covers details such as types of employment, job titles, roles, length of time in role, work location, annual salary, salary breakdowns by state, additi...
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July 26, 2025 • 74 mins
Episode 28 is a recording of a Berlin WTD meetup focused on UX writing processes, live streamed on March 9, 2020 at the Humanitec in Berlin. The meetup featured two speakers. Natasha Sarana, UX Writer at FlixMobility, talks about her company's attempts to include UX Writing in their research routine. She shares the main challenges they faced so far and how they deal with them. The second speaker, Roger Sheen, infor...
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July 26, 2025 • 57 mins
In episode 27 of the Write the Docs podcast, we're joined by Cynthia Ng and Amy Qualls from GitLab to talk about strategies for starting up docs in organizations where there aren't any other tech writers and where you're first on scene setting up shop. What are your first steps as a documentarian when there isn't anyone else, when processes, contacts, tools, and other systems aren't documented or described anywhere...
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July 26, 2025 • 64 mins
In episode 26, we talk with Alan Bowman about the technical writing forum on Reddit as well as the WTD Slack channel, comparing and contrasting the two spaces. Topics covered include pros and cons of anonymity on the internet, transparency around sensitive or taboo topics (e.g., salary, masters programs, feelings of overwhelm), age/experience demographics for both communities, balancing honesty with professionalism...
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July 26, 2025 • 56 mins
In episode 25, we talk with Andrew Head, Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, about his research on how developers use API documentation. Specifically, we focused on a recent article he co-authored titled When Not to Comment: Questions and Tradeoffs with API Documentation for C++ Projects. During the podcast, we chat about the following: where developers look for information, how developers manage in...
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July 26, 2025 • 55 mins
In this episode, we're joined by the Write the Docs Australia initiator Swapnil Ogale. We talk about conference wind-downs and ramp-ups, highlights from the just-finished WTD Prague conference, speakers announced for upcoming Write the Docs Australia conference, the Good Docs Project, the tech writing scene in Australia, and more.
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July 26, 2025 • 38 mins
In this episode, rather than the usual roundtable discussion, we provide a recording of a WTD Berlin presentation by Lucie Le Naour on how to write inclusive tech documentation. Inclusive documentation takes into account all users, regardless of their gender, culture, or abilities. It uses language that treats different types of people fairly and equally, acknowledging that the words you choose matter in the connot...
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July 26, 2025 • 61 mins
In episode 22, Giles Gaskell from Squiz in Australia joins us to talk about managing multiple doc projects across Git repositories through Antora. Giles explains how to establish processes such that updating documentation becomes part of the definition of done, how to manage build process across multiple Gitlab repositories, strategies for distributing doc work across engineers through templates, how to scale workl...
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July 26, 2025 • 50 mins
In episode 18 of the Write the Docs podcast, we discuss the recent Write the Docs Australia 2018 conference held in Melbourne. Jared was an emcee at the event and shares his inside perspective about what made the event so successful. We dive deep into the unconference format, how to instill the Write the Docs brand into the conference experience, how super volunteers can avoid burnout, what sessions stood out, and ...
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July 26, 2025 • 53 mins
In this episode, we explore the role of metadata in documentation and how it can be used to classify topics and assist in the discoverability of information. We're joined by special guest Eva Jackolis who explains a strategy for metadata used in German mechanical engineering documentation. We also discuss involving tech writers in UX copy and the challenges inherent in influencing UI copy, product naming, and worki...
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July 26, 2025 • 55 mins
In episode 2 of the Write the Docs podcast, we explore how to help users find what they're looking for in your documentation. We talk about various tools for findability: search, tags, faceted filters, sidebar navigation, inline links, related links, terms/glossaries, and breadcrumbs.
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July 26, 2025 • 58 mins
In this episode, we explore where technical writers belong in an organization. Is tech comm best placed within engineering, marketing, product management, or another group? We also talk about strategies for doc navigation, in particular, the merits of inline links and/or sidebar navigation, using a post from Every Page Is Page One as a starting point. Are hierarchical sidebar menus still useful, or are they a relic...
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July 26, 2025 • 63 mins
This episode focuses mainly on testing tools. Last month, some rockstar WTD community members spent a few days at the Pronovix offices in Szeged, Hungary, trying to create a series of open-source testing tools. Specifically, they wanted to create a ‘create a container deployable solution that can automatically check docs’. In more blunt terms, a kind of open-source Grammarly, but integrated into deploys and reposit...
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July 26, 2025 • 61 mins
In this episode, we talk about what's going on in our lives as documentarians and product owners. Chris talks about challenges in collaborating with reviewers in efficient ways. Google Docs works great for gathering comments, but it isn't so good for storing source code in a manageable format. Also, it seems that every company/client has their own preferred toolchain around reviews, and it's hard to know the best a...
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