I finished up the documentation processes section in my API course that I've been adding to over the last couple of months. Here's a list of all the article in this section. Read more »
I added a new article in my API documentation course about processes for changing internal doc culture. One of the most influential aspects that will determine your experience as a technical writer is the company's documentation culture and environment. If you find yourself in an organization with a poor documentation culture, it can be difficult if not impossible to change it. Poor documentation culture/environments lead to a high turnover on doc teams, loss of motivation for existing writers (especially as their colleagues constantly leave, which increases the workload), and contributes to a downward spiral of tasks you can never quite get a handle on. In this topic, I outline six strategies you can implement to influence change in your company's documentation culture. Read more »
I added a new article to my API documentation course on processes for external contributors. One of the main advantages of a version-control-based system, especially using open-source technologies, is the promise of collaboration. Not just collaboration with your immediate team, but scaling beyond your team to also include other contributors within your organization and even contributors from the community. Many people embrace docs-as-code with the hope and expectation that many engineers will contribute to the docs. In this section, I cover processes to consider when external contributors (external to your team, not necessarily external to the company) write content. Read more »
Documentation templates not only help teams align with consistent approaches in docs, templates help guide engineers, non-writers, or other roles in creating content, removing the intimidation of a blank page. A group of writers passionate about templates have been working together to create templates for a variety of documentation scenarios. This group's project is called The Good Docs Project. The project makes available templates for API overviews, quickstart guides, reference, how-to topics, discussions, tutorials, and more. The following is a guest post by Ankita Tripathi, a member of The Good Docs project, discussing the project and her motivations for getting involved. Read more »
In a previous post, I explored how Document360, a new cloud-based documentation platform, handles API documentation scenarios. This time, I decided to record a podcast with Saravana Kumar, founder of Document360, to get the behind-the-scenes story about how Document360 came about, what's driving their fast pace of development, and their roadmap for the future. Read more »