Haunted manuals lightning talk
by
Last week, I presented a lightning talk at Write the Docs based on my haunted manuals series. A recording of the talk is now available on YouTube. While I've been thinking about haunted manuals for a long time, the 5-minute lightning talk was something of a last-minute decision. I didn't practice and I made my slides over the lunch break. So I was curious to see the talk and find out what I actually said. I'm pleased to report that I mostly made sense and got the gist of my point across.
In case the embedded video doesn't go directly to my talk, you can find it around 20:30. You could also listen to the other lightning talks, which were good.
I've also lightly cleaned up my slides from the talk, which, if you watch it, you'll see mostly didn't work. Nonetheless, here they are. If you click through and open the deck in a new window, you can see my speaker notes, unlike me during the talk.
Links to all the talks, photos from the conference, and sketchnotes of the main talks are on the Write the Docs blog at Portland 2025 Recap - Talk Videos, Photos, Sketchnotes, CoC Report.
A little aside about masks #
I still wear a mask in most indoor places, and I wore a mask during most of the conference. The space was large and seemed well-ventilated with plenty of open windows and outdoor hangout areas. I considered keeping my mask on during the lightning talk like the courageous and exemplary Ed Yong did during his talk at the last XOXO. However, I wasn't confident that I would be able to articulate and be heard well enough with a mask on, felt that my ability to emote and screw up my face was an important part of my communication, and finally, felt that the risk of taking it off for five minutes on a stage with a large volume of air around me in all directions was fairly low for and for others.
Masks weren't required at Write the Docs, though a significant minority of people still wore them indoors. I never felt even a little weird about wearing a mask. To be fair, I'm pretty resistant to feeling weird, that is, I often don't pick up the social cues that I should feel weird. Or, let me rephrase that more accurately: I feel awkward very often with little apparent correlation to how other seem to actually think about me and the situation, so I've taken to just feeling comfortable about feeling awkward. You might argue that if I'm comfortable about feeling awkward, doesn't that actually make me comfortable? I don't know. Maybe. Sometimes.
It's like not being anxious about getting anxious. I remember reading somewhere that after a person has one panic attack, they can get into a spiral of getting panic attacks about getting a panic attack. I think social awkwardness is kind of like that. Anyway, my real point is that beyond my usual sense of low-level awkwardness in social situations, I did not feel anyone judging me, even mildly, about wearing a mask.