Hello again, faithful Chronicles of a Junior Dev readers! Apologies for my absence two weeks ago; I hope that my quirky linguistics and regular expressions blog post more than made up for it. Nevertheless, I’m happy to be back to writing the Chronicles.

Last weekend, I traveled to Amsterdam to present a talk entitled Building Beginner-Friendly API Tutorials at API the Docs, a community-driven offshoot of the Write the Docs conference series. It was an incredible experience.

In the spirit of the Chronicles’ transparency, I’ll publicly reflect how my talk went.

Overall, my talk was very well-received by the attendees of API the Docs. Here’s a smattering of their tweets:

I felt quite satisfied with the contents of my talk. Though given ~3 weeks to pitch and put together this talk, I worked hard to back up my thesis with examples and then turn my talking points into a compelling narrative. Thus, there are only few content-related things that I would’ve done differently.

One thing I’d like to do is add specificity to my takeaways. For instance, one of my seven tutorial-proofreading steps was to tell the beginner what to do upon completing the tutorial. However, what I failed to acknowledge is how difficult it can be to choose the appropriate next steps. I could have added supplementary advice and examples to this point.

Another content thing that I’d like to improve upon is to tailor this talk to its audience. Most of my proofreading tips would work for non-API tutorials, too. I used API-related examples, yes, but I’d like to perform an audit of this talk with future audiences in mind to make sure that I’m providing them with customized documentation tools.

My biggest qualm about my talk has to do with its delivery. I’m pleased with the speech itself – I can’t wait for the recording to see how I sounded! – but I regret my decision to try Slides on a whim.

I’ll admit it: I got sucked into the mindset that since all the “cool tech kids” were using Slides, I should, too. There are benefits to using Slides, such as its beautiful user interface and view metrics tracking. But what made me choose Slides – the ability to use my smartphone as a clicker – is what ended up disappointing me.

Since I haven’t given this talk at an event before, I wrote speaker notes to keep me on track. With Slides, these speaker notes show up on the smartphone-clicker: convenient, right? Not when the act of looking down at my phone felt more distracting (to the audience) and disorienting (to me) than simply using web-based speaker notes. Looking down at my phone made me feel unpolished.

On the bright side, I know for the future that I’ll stick to giving my talks with speaker notes on a laptop or, better yet, not relying upon speaker notes at all. Maybe I’m just a Google Slides girl at heart. 🙃

Talk dissection complete! Now I can share the best part of API the Docs: many of the speakers’ words underscored related themes and built upon one another. It felt amazing to be one of the people shaping the zeitgeist of this community of technical writers, engineers, developer evangelists, and other documentation enthusiasts.

Special thank you to Kristof, Laura, and Kathleen for organizing a stellar conference and helping me feel at home in Netherlands. You truly went above and beyond as conference organizers. Your compassionate leadership gives me faith in the API documentation community, and the tech industry at large.

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