May/June is a busy time for technical communicators, and this year was particularly so for me. Over a six-week period, I represented Expert Support at four events: Write the Docs Portland; the Write the Docs Local Meeting in San Francisco; the Open Source Summit in Minneapolis; and the AWS Summit in Los Angeles. Here’s a mini-travelog of the highlights.
Portland, Oregon: Write the Docs 2026
Every year, I look forward to the Write the Docs Portland conference, and it never disappoints. This year, Expert Support sponsored the Day 1 Lightning Talks. A staple of every Write the Docs conference, Lightning Talks are brief, fast-paced presentations open to anyone. Presenters can share on any topic of interest to them, even outside the tech docs arena. You can find videos of all the conference talks, Q&As, and proceedings at the Write the Docs YouTube channel.
San Francisco: Write the Docs Local Meeting
Following Portland, the Write the Docs local meeting in San Francisco offered a refreshing change of pace from the fast-paced conference atmosphere. This Meetup is great for networking with local tech writers, editors, and managers. Overall, the event had a distinctively Silicon Valley flavor, with many attendees from Bay Area technology companies. Kudos to Doug Purcell, technical writer at Supermicro, for organizing this dynamic event.
In my role as CEO of Expert Support, I was invited to sit on a panel with colleagues from Salesforce, GitBook, and Anthropic. In short, the discussion explored how AI is shifting documentation from a static resource to a dynamic infrastructure. Key themes included AI integration, documentation as data, and the governance gap created by new AI workflows. Find out more about the meeting on the Write the Docs Bay Area Meetup channel.
Minneapolis: Open Source Summit
The Open Source Summit always serves as a key stop for us because of our strong involvement with open source documentation. The highlight of the event from my perspective was meeting Mike Vizard of Techstrong Group. Mike interviewed me on critical industry topics, including the evolving integration of AI tools by technical writers. In addition, we discussed the partnership between Expert Support and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is documented in a CNCF published case study. Expert Support captured the interview highlights in a video called “Tech Docs Today: AI, Open Source, and More.” Learn more about the CNCF/Expert Support partnership in this short video.
Los Angeles: AWS Summit
Finally, I attended the AWS Summit in Los Angeles on June 10 at the LA Convention Center. The sheer size and scope of the AWS offering, and its growing vibrant ecosystem, are impressive. Yet, dozens of conversations there suggest growth is being artificially suppressed by the complexity such magnitude presents. Hopefully, Expert Support can help overcome some of that in the months ahead. Stay tuned!
In addition to work, I also squeezed in quick trips to Seattle to visit friends (where I got a personal tour of The Spheres), and to Sanibel Island in Florida to celebrate my brother’s birthday with four of my favorites: golf, sunshine, great food, and family!
Paul Gustafson is CEO at Expert Support. A long-time Silicon Valley veteran, Paul has helped hundreds of clients optimize their technical communication strategies.
Expert Support is a leading provider of technical writing and consulting services. We help companies ensure their software documentation is efficient to create, effective for users, and ready for the next wave of technology.