Jared (he/him) is a Senior Staff Technical Writer at Alphabet. His accomplishments include founding Waymo’s documentation team, co-founding Google Cloud’s documentation team, and co-authoring the book Docs for Developers: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing.

He’s worked for the past 17 years documenting an array of projects at Alphabet, including Kubernetes, Fuchsia, App Engine, and Adsense. He currently leads technical documentation at Waymo and mentors several junior writers in the industry.

2000 to 1: Surviving and Thriving as the First Writer

Are you a lone wolf writer howling into the void? The first technical writer at your company, facing a mountain of undocumented code and a sea of skeptical engineers? Maybe you’re considering taking the plunge into a documentation desert, bravely venturing where no writer has gone before.

Join me as I share my journey of building a thriving documentation organization at Waymo, where I was tasked with developing internal documentation for 2000 engineers to launch our autonomous vehicle service.

This talk dives into my journey and the key lessons learned in establishing an organizational culture that values documentation, including:

• Creating documentation processes where none existed
• Convincing engineers to value and prioritize writing
• Securing leadership buy-in for documentation initiatives
• Leading documentation “fixits” and measuring developer satisfaction

Drawing on external research (DORA) and my own experience, I’ll share practical strategies to win over hearts and minds, navigate challenges, and build a thriving documentation organization.

In this session, attendees will learn:

• How to think about internal documentation and documentation processes
• Creating documentation processes where none existed
• Convincing engineers to value and prioritize writing
• Securing leadership buy-in for documentation initiatives
• Leading documentation “fixits” and measuring developer satisfaction