Write the Docs Bay Area

Event Agenda
6:30–7:00 PM: Arrivals and structured networking
Challenge: Make at least one new LinkedIn connection during this time.
7:00–7:15 PM: Community announcements
Are you hiring, looking for work, or eager to share a cool project you’ve been working on? Deliver a 30-second elevator pitch to the Write the Docs Bay Area community.
7:15–8:30 PM: Talks
8:30–9:00 PM: Continued networking
9:00 PM: Hard stop
Optional: Continue networking at a nearby bar.

Featured talks:

Speaker: Doug Purcell
Role: Technical Writer at Supermicro
Title: AI Assistance for Enforcing Style Guidelines in Technical Documentation
Description: Style guidelines, such as those from Google and Microsoft, serve as a blueprint for creating content at scale with consistency. Consistent terminology, wording, and style choices make content easier for end users to understand and reduce cognitive load. However, enforcing consistency becomes increasingly difficult as documentation teams and content sets grow. Tools like Vale can help by linting documentation, but they are limited to deterministic checks.
In this talk, I will walk you through a project I built from scratch and show how I used artificial intelligence to turbocharge my Vale implementation. This approach enables stronger style enforcement and higher-quality content rewrites.

Speaker: Andrew Fetter
Role: Principal Technical Writer at Roblox
Talk title: AI and Compound Interest
Description: This talk covers some AI-powered productivity boosts and cautions against round pegs in square holes. Technical writers—everyone in tech, really—are continually grasping at single-digit gains, and AI offers a slew of new ways to achieve them. Andrew also covers the most important productivity strategy of all, which might or might not have anything to do with AI.

Speaker: Raytao Xia
Role: Platform at Etched
Title: AI Agents as Hands on the Keyboard
Description: Coding agents such as Claude Code and OpenAI Codex are often treated as code generators. In practice, they go further; they can write code, execute commands, and run programs, scripts, and applications on your behalf. Leveraged effectively, your short inputs expand into entire workflows.

Panel Sponsored by Promptless

A panel discussion on technical writing career development, evolving roles, and essential skills in the age of large language models (LLMs).
Additional details will be announced in the coming weeks.

Panelists:

• Manny Silva
• TBD
• TBD
• TBD

Moderator: Prithvi Ramakrishnan

More details to come in the upcoming weeks.