Write the Docs Berlin 2025

Overview

I gave a talk at the recent Write the Docs Berlin 2025 conference. For those of you not familiar with Write the Docs, it’s a global community of people who care about documentation. They have regular conferences in different locations around the world. It was a fantastic event with a very diverse lineup of speakers and attendees. I really enjoyed the experience.

I had previously spoken at Write the Docs Atlantic in 2023 where I talked about terminology management, and, while I enjoyed it a lot, it was a virtual event and I did miss the in-person interaction a little bit.

This time it was great to be physically at the venue - my first Write the Docs event in-person!

My talk

My talk was about building new documentation platforms for the company I work for.

It generally covered how we tackled the issue of fragmented, hard-to-find documentation after several company acquisitions by creating unified support and developer portals with a docs-as-code approach (using the Hugo static site generator and Git, amongst other tooling). Key steps included identifying user personas, migrating varied content to Markdown and training contributors.

We managed to overcome challenges like rebranding, translation and search with deliberate process choices. The result: improved documentation discoverability, reduced support needs and valuable lessons on early stakeholder engagement and technical trade-offs.

Below you can see a recording of my talk on YouTube:

Other talks from the event

You can watch recordings of the other talks from the conference on the Write the Docs YouTube channel.

In summary

For anyone interested in documentation and technical writing, I highly recommend attending a Write the Docs conference if you get the chance! It’s a great opportunity to learn from others in the field, share experiences and connect with like-minded professionals. I especially enjoyed the unconference sessions where attendees could propose and lead discussions on topics of interest.

I’m already looking forward to the next Write the Docs event!