Docs as a Decision System with Danielle Washington

*We're back! This episode marks our return from summer break, and we couldn't have picked a better guest to kick things off.* Ren sits down with Danielle Washington — technical documentation writer with stops at HPE, Weaviate, and now 10A Labs — for a conversation about how she found her way into tech comm through candle-making, teaching English in Spain, and political science, and what that winding path taught her about writing for readers. Danielle shares her "Day 0, Day 1, Day 2" framework for structuring documentation around the decisions readers are actually making, why she treats herself as "user zero" by testing everything she writes, the EKS configurator she built at Weaviate to replace words with a tool, and her take on where AI is pushing (and sometimes pressuring) the technical writing profession. ## In this episode - Danielle's unconventional path into technical writing — from a high school blog, to political science, to running a candle company, to landing at HPE - Being the first and only technical writer embedded on an engineering team, and how she learned to prioritize what to document first - "Docs as a decision system": the Day 0 / Day 1 / Day 2 framework for thinking about what a reader needs to decide at each stage - Why Danielle tests her own documentation as "user zero" instead of only writing from the user's perspective - The EKS configurator she built at Weaviate to replace fragile, error-prone YAML instructions with a real tool - Her move from HPE (GreenLake) to Weaviate (deployment docs, vector databases) to 10A Labs (information retrieval systems) - Agent-friendly documentation, the shift toward tooling over pure prose, and why AI shouldn't be a scapegoat for layoffs - Her hill to die on: documentation is a product surface, not a support feature ## Resources mentioned - From Kitchen Experiments to Five Star Service: The Weaviate Development Journey — Danielle's Weaviate blog post applying the Day 0/Day 1/Day 2 framework to the developer journey - How We Are Building the Core of the AI-Native Stack — the original Weaviate post that introduced the Day 0/Day 1/Day 2 mindset - Danielle Washington on LinkedIn - Previous Behind the Docs episodes referenced in this conversation: - Designing Documentation for Agents, Not Just Users — with Dachary Carey of MongoDB - Doc testing, skills files, and the guardians of knowledge — with Manny Silva of Skyflow, creator of Doc Detective