DeveloperHub is a new publishing platform for API documentation that lets you combine your API reference information with tutorials and other documentation, complete with search, branding, navigation, and other features in a developer portal. In this post, I asked Zaid Daba'een, CEO & Founder of DeveloperHub, to share a bit of info about DeveloperHub.
I'm giving an API Documentation Workshop in San Francisco, California, on November 19, 2019. You can register on Eventbrite here.
This past week I held my first API documentation workshop in which I organized it from start to finish myself (handling registration, venue, dates, catering, marketing, setup, and other details), and now I'd like to reflect a bit on it.
I added a new article in my API doc course that expands the notion of docs as code to include not only tools but processes as well. I included an excerpt below and a link to the full article.
A reader recently asked how to collaborate with Git with other writers. He said they found it hard to develop a Git workflow that allowed them to work on content together and wondered if another approach might be more suitable.
Previous articles I've shared on documenting code introduced the complexity of the challenge. In this article, I expand on five different techniques writers take in documenting their code, including the Lego approach, the Nautilus approach, juxtaposed columns, and more. In particular, I expand on why describing the finalized code might not be so instructive for users, and why it's nearly impossible for writers to decompile the developer's logic that led to the finalized code anyway. See Five strategies for documenting code.
I added another topic to the Documenting Code section in my API documentation course. This new topic is called Research on documenting code and summarizes/discusses two academic articles on documenting code.
I recently added a new section in my API documentation course on documenting code. This is an entire section that I'm building out with about 7-8 topics. The introduction is called Why documenting code is so difficult.
In episode 22 of the Write the Docs podcast, Giles Gaskell from Squiz in Australia joins us to talk about managing multiple doc projects across Git repositories through Antora. Giles explains how to establish processes such that updating documentation becomes part of the definition of done, how to manage build process across multiple Gitlab repositories, strategies for distributing doc work across engineers through templates, how to scale workloads when you're the lone technical writer in the company, times when dogfooding your own product for docs makes sense and when it does not, pros and cons of Asciidoc versus Markdown, and more docs-as-code topics.
Jekyll lets you separate out your data from your presentation layer. You can store your data in a YAML file and then populate the data into templates as desired, passing parameters into includes. In this post, I describe my process for creating tables where I might re-use the same definitions in various places in the docs.
I'm giving an API Documentation Workshop in Mountain View, California, on August 30, 2019. Although I've given more than a dozen API documentation workshops at various conferences over the past several years, this one is different. For this workshop, I'm organizing it myself. You can register on Eventbrite.
Some tech comm projects are like monsters we battle. Is there any truth to the idea that it takes a monster to kill a monster?
GraphQL, a query language developed by Facebook, is an alternative to REST that is rising in popularity. Exactly how does GraphQL differ from REST, and what documentation strategies and conventions should you follow when documenting a GraphQL project? In this guest post, Casey Armstrong explores GraphQL — the query language, its use cases, its tools, what developers need from its docs, and whether GraphQL is worth learning. Overall, Casey argues that learning GraphQL is a great way to specialize and stand out as a technical writer, but the technology is not talked about in the tech comm/API writing community as much as it is in the developer community.
I recently gave a presentation on technical communication trends to the STC Puget Sound Chapter in Seattle, Washington, on May 21, 2019. This is one of the better presentations on trends I've given and culminates a lot of research and other iterations on this topic during the past year. You can view a recording of the presentation, check out the slides, grab the audio file, and see other details here.
Let's say you need to create and publish technical documentation. Maybe you have a team of distributed authors, and you need all the robustness of an advanced tech doc solution, but you don't want to create your own version from scratch. (I've argued in numerous posts that creating your own tools from scratch can require a lot of time and hidden expenses.) Enter ClickHelp. ClickHelp is a flexible, online help authoring solution that offers an impressive number of features, from context-sensitive help to built-in metrics, content re-use, PDF export, full-text search, password protection, full review cycles, readability analysis, and more. In this post, I'll provide brief descriptions and screenshots as we browse through the various features ClickHelp offers.
