It was hard to choose which tech writing conference to go to this year. Our team decided to spend the 2023 budget on these 7 conferences. The first one is over! Let us share our experience – biased maybe, but hopefully useful to those who plan to attend next year. Audience: There's a whole world outside of IT  Nordic Techkomm is the first tekom conference we've attended. tekom is the largest professional association for technical communication in Europe, and they hold several events throughout the year. Stockholm's Nordic Techkomm was the earliest, so we jumped in.  To our s

To stay ahead of the curve, the Writerside team attends various events to discuss new trends, technologies, and best practices for authoring and publishing technical content. Come meet us, get a quick demo of our product, and discuss the latest developments in writing and publishing docs-as-code.

The more we work on a tool, the more intuitive and easy to use it seems. This is why documentation is sometimes postponed to the last minute, or even scrapped completely. Customers are left to figure out for themselves what the tool can do. However, documentation benefits even a small team, especially at an early stage of a product’s development. Documentation helps to flatten the learning curve. Fewer users will drop off because they fail to find a feature. It takes the burden off support, which is a big advantage for a small team.Online documentation improves content marketing and

Single-source publishing is a powerful must-have feature that is normally among the top three competitive advantages for any professional help authoring solution – and for good reason. Single-sourcing reusable content lets you: Maintain consistency throughout your documentation in terms of style, terminology, the level of detail, and so on. Avoid making multiple updates when a user interface or a workflow changes.Reduce the review and editing effort.Reduce the localization costs.Automate the routine – reproducing the same pieces of content repeatedly adds mundane work and duplicates yo

One day you write some code, commit, push, and then receive a comment on the pull request: “Looks good. Oh, but you misspelled this word in a class name". Now you have to change the pull request just because of the typo. Annoying and time-consuming, isn't it? How IntelliJ IDEA spellchecks code IntelliJ IDEA understands that code constructs like classes and methods should not be spellchecked like regular words. At the same time, it can split complex CamelCase names and check the spelling of each segment. If you misspell a specific word within a class name, IntelliJ IDEA will underline

A writing style guide is a set of rules and agreements for everyone involved in writing or editing documentation in a company. Usually, a style guide prescribes using certain words, expressions, terms, and punctuation. It can sometimes go even beyond that and cover content architecture or UI texts. What are the main benefits of following a style guide?  It will be a single point of truth to keep the documentation consistent even when it's written by a team of writers, each with their own personal writing style.It alleviates the editors' workload coming from external contributors.A s

When you ask someone what’s wrong with your documentation, the top 3 answers will be: no one reads it, it is misleading, and it is outdated. In this post, we will discuss how to keep your documentation up to date. Hey, doc! Why so outdated? Documentation is not source code. For code, you can write tests and check whether it works before the release, but for content-related things, such checks are harder to implement. So the question is this: how can we make sure documentation is up to date and working properly? But before we answer that, let’s take a step back and try to understand why i