What we’re about
We are people who care about making the reader experience awesome by delivering excellent documentation. We are writers, developers, designers, learning professionals, and documentation enthusiasts. Come to our meetup and strategize how to make documentation great, and meet others in the Bay Area who care about documentation.
** To see events for all the local WTD groups (San Francisco, East Bay, and South Bay/Peninsula), click Meetups.
** Access our GitHub repo, https://github.com/San-Francisco-Write-The-Docs.
** Read the Write the Docs Code of Conduct at http://www.writethedocs.org/code-of-conduct/.
Upcoming events
3
How Do Today's Technical Writers Get Things Done?
WRITER HQ, 111 Maiden Ln, San Francisco, CA, USJoin us for a meetup focused on the tools, workflows, and systems that help technical writers scale their impact, collaborate across teams, and grow in their careers! We have four speakers lined up:
Speaker Lineup
Speaker: Renée Carignan
Company: Gem
Role: Lead Technical Writer
Title: Find the frequency: metrics for better docs and happier readers (2025 edition)
Description: (This is my Write The Docs Australia 2023 talk, updated for 2025 + slimmed down time-wise for this meetup!) When it comes to quantifying the "success" of documentation, trying to use metrics to figure out if your docs are actually helping people can be a daunting and frustrating task.Most analytics tools were built primarily with marketers and product managers in mind, and sorting through the near-infinite analytics features has lead many a documentarian to spend too much time tuned into metrics that don't result in any tangible docs improvements. In this talk, I'll share my insights into which metrics can provide the most value for you as a docs writer based on my 6+ years leading the docs team at two product analytics software companies.
Through lots of trial, error, and writing meta-docs about analytics while grappling with them myself, I managed to suss out several metrics which consistently resulted in tangible docs improvements that made us (and our readers) happier. By the end of this talk, you'll have a handy list of metrics which may prove beneficial for your team, and a strengthened intuition for when a metric is simply noise to tune out - and what may be worth tuning into.
Speaker: Adam Wood
Company: Martian
Role: Technical Writer / Developer Relations
Title: 2 Fast 2 Purpureous
Description: LLMs can write technical documentation way faster than human writers can. But the results are often a particular form of "purple prose" - overly elaborate, ornate text that doesn't get at what you are trying to actually write.
This talk will look at which parts of documentation writing can be automated, which can be assisted, and which are best left (for now) to human artisans.Speaker: Frances Liu
Company: Promptless
Role: Co-Founder, a former Head of Product
Title: How to get unblocked as a documentarian
Description: As a former head of product, I was terrible at enabling our technical writer. I had context on the feature releases, but not what's in the docs, and our writer knows the docs inside-out (including the screenshots), but doesn't always know what the feature really is about. In this talk, I want to share some tools and systems that can help documentarians stay in the loop without getting overwhelmed, gather necessary context, and hold SMEs accountable.Speaker: Sarah Deaton
Company: WRITER
Role: Developer Experience
Title: Context engineering for docs teams: onboarding humans AND AI
Description: What if the same guides that help your new teammate ramp up could also make your AI tools smarter? In this talk, I'll share how setting up basic onboarding materials—style guides, linting rules, and process docs—unexpectedly transformed my AI tools from unreliable assistants into collaborative teammates. You'll learn practical ways to build context once and get compounding returns from both human writers and AI tools like Cursor and CodeRabbit.- Getting There
- BART: Closest station is Montgomery (598 Market St)
- Muni: Closest stop is Market St and Sansome St, approximately 0.5 miles away
- Driving: Use SpotHero for parking, or consider Uber or Lyft for convenience
Sponsored by Writer and organized by Words n Logic.
31 attendees
Strategies for Leveling Up Your Technical Writing Skills
WRITER HQ, 111 Maiden Ln, San Francisco, CA, USKnowledge professionals are already working in an era shaped by artificial intelligence. From natural language generation to content summarization and analysis, AI is steadily influencing how we create, manage, and deliver documentation.
A recent McKinsey report estimates that up to 50% of today’s work activities could be automated between 2030 and 2060, with a midpoint around 2045. Rather than replacing professionals, this shift highlights the growing need for technical writers to adapt—by learning new tools, refining their workflows, and staying ahead of emerging trends.
That's why continuous learning and intentional growth matter more than ever. Whether you're improving your writing process, experimenting with automation, or building new skills, this meetup is designed to help you grow.
If you have strategies, lessons, or tools that have helped you level up as a technical writer, we’d love for you to share them.
Want to be a speaker?Speaker Lineup
Speaker: Sarah Ahmed
Title: Staff Technical Writer
Company: Salesforce
Talk title: Augmenting the Mundane with AI
Talk description: Repetitive, low-value tasks can consume time, lead to inconsistencies, and cause team burnout. By augmenting these tasks with generative AI, reach goals faster and ultimately have more strategic capacity as a team. Learn how to identify, prioritize, and start building generative AI solutions for tasks. We'll also discuss ways to scale your solutions across your team and beyond.Speaker: Elvis Kahoro
Company: Chalk.ai
Title: Developer advocate @ chalk.ai
Talk title: KSON - A JSON compatible human friendly configuration language
Talk description: We seem to be approaching the very problem of configuration from a flawed starting point, setting way too low expectations for our tools. We are failing to see that configuration files are actually user interfaces, and that they should be treated as such. Once you start thinking of configuration files as user interfaces, it suddenly makes sense to demand an excellent user experience for working with them. The whole point of a user interface is to make the software accessible, with mechanisms that prevent human error and guide the user down the pit of success. We all recognize bad UX when it feels like you are fighting the computer to achieve a specific goal. In an ideal world, the computer would enhance you without getting in the way, like a bicycle for the mind. What would configuring software look like if our tools were rooted in the “configuration is UI” paradigm? Can we realistically dream of an ecosystem in which configuration is a joy to write and maintain?Speaker: Ethan Palm
Title: Technical Writer
Company: Mintlify
Talk title: What does AI-native even mean?
Talk description: AI buzzwords abound. How do we go from ideas to something actionable? I'll share how my team aligned on why and when we use AI tools; what we achieved; and ways to navigate AI ambiguity—whether you're facing broad mandates to 'use more AI' or trying to identify valuable use cases.Speaker: Sreya Dutta
Title: Technical Writer
Company: Oracle
Talk title: Key Human Skills in the Age of AI
Talk description: Will AI will take human jobs or will certain human skills which were undermined in the past become more valuable? I'll share my take on which human skills will make technical writers more valuable.Speaker: Shivangi Dua
Title: Technical Writer & AI Corpus Builder
Company: Student (prev @Oracle)
Talk title: The New Role of Technical Writers: Teaching AI Not to Hallucinate
Talk description: At Oracle, I curated developer content to increase adoption. Now, building an AI corpus for Spark&Nudge, I write documentation that serves two audiences: humans who need answers today and AI systems that will help users tomorrow. Here's what I've learned: AI hallucinations often start with unclear docs. As an early-career writer who integrated AI into my workflow from day one, I use it to brainstorm, bridge disconnected ideas, and polish drafts. But I also test every piece of documentation with one question: could an AI trained only on this give an accurate response? In this talk, I'll share my workflow and two practical strategies you can use immediately: the AI Training Test and how to use AI as your first reviewer. Technical writers aren't being replaced. We're becoming the people who teach AI not to lie.Getting There
- BART: Closest station is Montgomery (598 Market St)
- Muni: Closest stop is Market St & Sansome St (approximately 0.5 miles away)
- Driving: Use SpotHero for parking, or consider Uber or Lyft for convenience
Source: McKinsey – The Economic Potential of Generative AI
Sponsored by Writer and organized by Words n Logic.
21 attendees
Past events
94
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