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.

Launch to the Sun: Implementing Docs like Sunshine Principles

Google’s DevOps Research and Assessment program (DORA), found that high quality documentation shines the path to increased productivity and clearer decision making at organizations. However, high quality documentation doesn’t build itself.
How do you fix an organization without documentation? How do you build a company culture that values writing things down as part of its process? How do you get buy-in from leadership?
In this talk, I show how I applied findings from DORA’s program to advocate for and build a documentation organization at Waymo as its first technical writer. I show step by step my process for addressing these questions, including creating processes for documentation, leading documentation fixits, and measuring developer satisfaction at scale. I also show how you can apply these principles and processes to your own organization.

In this session, attendees will learn:

• Recap of DORA’s research findings

As Waymo’s first writer:

• Arriving and assessing the situation
• Communicating the value of docs – show not tell
• Building resources for internal documentation
• Building partnerships
• Leading documentation sprints
• Measuring improvements

How you can apply these principles to your work