Hyperviews Online

by Matthew Arnold Stern

Editor’s note: Matt was an Online SIG volunteer at the STC Annual Conference, May 7 to 10, in Las Vegas. He posted entries on his blog during the conference, and provided the information to the Online SIG for our report on the conference.

Day 1: Vive Las Vegas!

If you can walk from Paris to New York and pass Monte Carlo, it must be Las Vegas. I’m here for the STC Conference that will be held at the adjoining Paris and Bally hotels.

The conference shows that the economy and technical writing field has recovered from the post-dot bomb and 9/11 gloom. The most obvious indicator: trade show swag. Once again, booths have nice pens and other toys to give away, and they’re having drawings for iPods. Also vendors are getting serious about producing tools to serve the technical writing community. Adobe is reviving RoboHelp and updating FrameMaker. MadCap is coming out with a full product line of technical writing products. Of course, there are translation services galore.

Another sign of the recovery: food. The welcoming reception had lots of goodies to eat, but they didn’t serve anything to drink except what you can buy at the cash bar.

I enjoyed touching base with people I hadn’t seen in a while. Jack Molisani was promoting LavaCon in Hawaii and was dressed for the occasion in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. (This was actually a smart fashion choice because the temperature been in the 90s here.)

I’m not speaking at the conference. It has been nice to take a break from speaking and just go to sessions. I will be hosting a table at the Tuesday networking luncheon.

The downside of the conference is that I’ll be missing one of my son’s Little League games. I’ve been the manager of his team this season, and this is the only game I’ll miss. Fortunately, my assistant coach will be running the team in my absence, and my wife and the parents on the team promised plenty of photos and emailed reports. This won’t be a “Cat’s in the Cradle” moment.

Day 2: Smoke gets in your eyes

I’ve always hated cigarettes, but I hate them all the more after my second day in Vegas. The conference sessions are spread out between the Paris and the adjoining Bally’s. Between them, square foot after square foot of casino, all filled with smokers. As a native of the most cigarette-hating state in the Union, California, I’m not used to all this indoor cigarette smoke.

Fortunately, the conference rooms are smoke-free too. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to hear some great speakers:

• Our keynote speakers were Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, the creators of TCP/IP that made the Internet possible. I had the same feeling watching them as I did listening to Neal Armstrong back in 1989. Here were two people who will be in history books for years to come. Yet, they were personable and funny. (Vinton said that he would add to his accomplishments that he did comedy in Vegas.)
• Next was a session by Bogo Vatovec, “From a Technical Writer to a Usability Engineer.” If you think all you need to do for usability testing is read usability books, watch users, and make comments, you’re wrong. You need to develop a skill set to be a usability engineer, and there are a number of disciplines within the field.
• In the afternoon, there was a presentation about DITA (yet another acronym we technical writers have to learn about). But this presentation was given by one of the co-authors of the spec, Michael Priestly. He gave an overview of how DITA came to be and what problems it attempted to solve. By the way, DITA stands for Darwin Information Typing Architecture.
• My afternoon sessions ended with a Web services primer by Craig Noeldner. His formal presentation was short, but his Q and A session revealed some useful information for technical writers needing to document Web services.

Between sessions, I persued the exhibition hall picking up lots of swag to give to the kids, dropping business cards into fishbowls for drawings (where I’m likely to win tons of sales calls), getting clues for a treasure hunt competition (a clever way to get attendees to speak to vendors), and even getting useful information on products we may actually consider purchasing.

The most interesting part of the day was at the networking lunch. I met a woman who worked at a business a mile away from the Pentagon when it was attacked on September 11. The morning before the attack, she had taken the Metro train that had a station under the Pentagon. She had learned about the attack on the World Trade Center later that morning, and then she heard the sirens of the fire trucks and ambulances that rushed to the Pentagon when it was attacked. She and her coworkers were evacuated, and had to wait at a nearby hotel for four hours before they could get home. Even though it has been nearly five years since the attack, it still stays in our minds.

It will be another full day at the conference tomorrow, and I’ll be hosting one of the tables at the networking lunch.

Day 3: Boom!

A number of us were awakened at 2:30 a.m. by a loud boom. These days, one expects the worst when hearing an explosion, but it was only another Las Vegas hotel heading to the Great Strip in the Sky. The Boardwalk, a hole-in-the-wall casino near New York-New York. My co-worker and I passed by it on Monday thinking, “They’re going to demolish that place any day now, aren’t they?” Sure enough, it came down early the next morning. Usually casino demolitions are big entertainment events, but there was no publicity about this one. Either the casino wasn’t significant enough, or it was too close to the street to gather a crowd safely.

There was plenty to keep us entertained safely inside the Paris and Bally’s. The biggest boom is in agile development, and there were two sessions about technical writing in this environment. My new project uses Scrum, so these sessions were the most applicable to me. Robert Armstrong, a panelist at one of the sessions, is setting up an online discussion group for agile technical writers, and this will be a great resource for us.

The most engaging and educational session I went to was one about paper prototyping by Karen Mobley and Kristin Eberstein. We went through an exercise where we prototyped a Help menu on paper. This is definitely something I will use at work.

A group of us tried to get into the late afternoon session on Wikis. When it was filled up, we grabbed a table in the ballroom at had an impromptu session on video blogs and podcasts. Fortunately, one of the people was Stephanie Bryant, author of Video Blogs for Dummies, which will be coming out in July. She pointed out one interesting fact: Podcasts are the only new technology where religious content dominated before “adult” content.

Day 4: We’ll always have Paris

I’m writing this final entry about the STC Conference in the comfort of my home. No cigarette smoke. No noisy casinos. No buffets. I still have a bag stuffed with literature go through and a trip report and expense report to complete at work. Just a few final impressions.

The energy level at the conference stayed high on the last day. Usually, by a final day of a conference, the attendees who didn’t catch an earlier flight have their oversaturated minds focused on the trip home. The sessions on Wednesday were all very good, especially an entertaining one by Beth Agnew about videocasting.

At Beth’s session, she talked about the term “digital native,” meaning someone who grew up in the computer era and feels comfortable with computers, the Internet, and technology. This is compared to someone who is a “digital immigrant” who grew up before computers and has a hard time getting used to it. When one of her students at the college she teaches at accused her of being a “digital immigrant,” she said she is a “digital pioneer.” I also fit in the same category.

And on the frontier of new technology, the line between programmer and technical writer continues to blur. The other two sessions I attended on Wednesday covered documentation where writing and development overlap. The first was about software developer kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs). These require documentation where either the programmer has to provide content, or the writer has to go into the source code and edit or write comments to appear in generated reference guides. The other session was about embedded Help, where instructions are built into the application interface. This also requires close coordination with writers and programmers.

On the whole, this year’s STC Conference was excellent. It reassured me to see the large number of attendees and the active participation of leading vendors. It’s a sign that our field has recovered from the dot-bomb bust and 9/11. New technologies and approaches to documentation continue to become available to us. Our field is vibrant and growing, and that is good news for all of us technical writers.

The other reassuring thing I saw was the large contingent of writers from around the world. At the conference, I met technical writers from Australia, Belgium, Canada, India, and Israel. I felt proud to be part of a worldwide group of professionals who all have an interest in improving their skills and craft and helping their customers.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 13th, 2006 at 3:57 pm and is filed under News: Online SIG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.