No Onion In My Salad: Write The Docs Redux

I was very pleased an humbled to read this recently:

Yay @nigelbabu! Also, cool shoutout to @therealpadams just in time for @writethedocs Prague :-) #writethedocs https://t.co/rlxuTXJfsG

— Mikey Ariel (@thatdocslady) July 31, 2015

I spoke at the Write The Docs unconf in Berlin a year. It had been a long time since I had spoken at a non-engineering event. Even longer since I last spoke at an event without an explicit Free Software connection, too. I enjoyed the event and I obviously did not make a fool out of myself, because I am due to speak at the next Write The Docs European conference in Prague.

What Happened in Berlin?

Last year I gave a talk about growing communities of (Free Software) engineers and about how community works in engineering. At the time I posited that collaboration between software engineering and documentation writing can be improved if we improve our understanding of each other... https://speakerdeck.com/padams/no-onion-in-my-salad-how-to-manage-emerging-communities ...which led me to ask some questions at the end. After my presentation during the "unconference" part of the unconference a group of us sat down to try and answer one of the questions I posed in my presentation:

What are the rules documentarians play by?

If you follow the link in the Tweet (above) or follow this link here you will find Nigel's report on what we concluded in that session. OK, so I learned a thing or two about how documents are prepared in the software product world. Cool. What's next?

What's Happening in Prague?

Well, if we are to improve understanding between document writers and engineers there needs to be a little "push" as well as "pull". That's where my talk in Prague comes in. Having learned something about how document writers behave/work, it is time for me to return the favour. In "Judas Priest Ate My ScrumMaster" I will talk about some of the "laws" of software engineering and what they mean, in reality, for engineers "on the ground". Do these same laws apply to document writers? And, if so, could they form the basis of a common understanding between those writing the software and those documenting it? Could this common understanding lead to improved collaboration and better processes? Let's find out in Prague!