In this episode of the Write the Docs podcast, we chat with Kadir Topal, product manager for Mozilla Developer Network Web Docs project, about how they manage their large body of documentation for web developers. The MDN project provides standards-based documentation around web development topics (for example, HTML, CSS, and JS) intended for web developers, with the goal of producing consistent experiences for users across web browsers. Kadir gives us an inside look into the challenges, goals, and roadmap with this project.
When you don't have a system that logs users in and tracks their progress, it can be a challenge to show their progress in a course. However, rather than showing progress through completed pages, quizzes, or other interactive exercises, progress can also be measured through larger user goals that extend beyond the course. In the case of my API documentation course, the user's goal is to break into the field of API documentation, not so much to finish a course. Breaking into API documentation requires users to build a compelling portfolio, which is how I'm choosing to measure the user's progress.
In the Publishing your API documentation section of my API documentation course, I recently added a new topic called "Case study: Switching tools to docs-as-code". In this article, I dive into a lot of challenges, decisions, and other details we faced in converting to the docs-as-code model, especially when publishing the output directly from the server.
I recently gave a presentation titled "Introduction to API Documentation" to the STC Silicon Valley chapter in Santa Clara, California. The video recording and audio are available here.
Writing is an activity that is best balanced with equal measures of editing and learning. Overdoing any one activity can lead to exhaustion and burnout, but by balancing these three activities — writing, editing, and learning — you can switch to different neural muscles and find more energy in the long-term.
I added a new tutorial on creating an OpenAPI 3.0 specification document in my API course. (OpenAPI was formerly referred to as Swagger.) The tutorial has 8 steps and guides you through the process of creating the specification document in the context of a sample weather API. Additionally, I explain how the specification fields get displayed in Swagger UI. Swagger UI is the display framework that reads the OpenAPI spec and generates an interactive documentation website.
Techwriter.pl is an online hub of information for technical writers in Poland. Although it's maintained by volunteers, the site continues to thrive from its inception in 2013 up through today. The following is a guest post by Michal Skowron and Jakub Wisniewski, two Poland-based technical writers who helped shape Techwriter.pl and who wanted to tell the story of the site.
Finding the right software tools to write API docs is a constant and difficult challenge given the wide variety of tooling and environments in the developer doc space. However, if your goal is to break into developer documentation (rather than specifically reworking your company's documentation tools), you would be better off deepening your technical background with programming languages rather than focusing on doc tools.
In this episode of the Write the Docs podcast, we talk about what's going on in our lives as documentarians and product owners. We don't have special guests during this episode. Instead, we discuss challenges we're facing and any interesting aspects of our documentation lives.
When documenting REST APIs, the OpenAPI specification (formerly called Swagger) is pretty much the default standard. Yet learning the OpenAPI spec is not a trivial undertaking and requires significant ramp-up. SwaggerHub is a tool can reduce the complexity in creating your OpenAPI spec file because it enables collaboration between both developers and technical writers. This collaboration not only helps compensate for gaps in understanding with the spec, SwaggerHub also offers many other features (such as versioning, content re-use, inline commenting, and more) to make the authoring and publishing experience easier.
gd2md-html is a Google Docs add-on that will convert your Google Doc content into either Markdown or HTML. This tool provides a much-needed converter that enables you to use Google Docs as a platform for content development without manually reformatting the content when you're ready to publish it in another system.
Although technical writers champion plain language, embracing plain language for many years can cripple your ability to use more eloquent language, like that of a literary author or essayist. There isn't much room for literary play or playful tones in technical documentation. Following the rules of simple language has distorted my ability to read anything that blatantly violates those rules without questioning the author's word choice and sentence construction. Sometimes I feel that simple language has removed my ability to delight more in language and to express myself in more articulate, interesting ways.
In this episode of the Write the Docs podcast, we're joined by Ellis Pratt from Cherryleaf to talk about chatbots in documentation. What are chatbots, and how can you incorporate them in your docs to enhance the user experience? Are chatbots the next evolution of wizards? What are some examples of successful chatbots? How does one get started using chatbots in documentation? Are there chatbot services you can leverage inexpensively to try them out? These are some of the questions explored in this podcast.
This past week I had some good discussions with developers about the right directions in our doc-as-code project at work. I say good discussions, but actually they were challenging. The outcome led me to realize more details about embracing docs as code. The more you treat docs as code, the more you may have to set aside some common tech writer models of handling content and instead embrace the software code workflows entirely. Some of these principles include storing only source code in repositories, building from a build management system, and reducing build pipelines to work with 1 or 2 larger repositories only.
In this Write the Docs Podcast episode, we're joined by Beth Aitman to talk about what happened with the Stack Overflow Documentation Beta. What did Stack Overflow try to do with documentation, and why did they abandon the effort? Why did their effort to crowdsource docs fail but succeed so well with forums and niche content? Additionally, we discuss the difficulties of creating good documentation with open source projects. A recent survey found that incomplete or outdated documentation is the number one issue with open source projects. Why? What makes it so difficult to create documentation on an open source project?
