A primer on documentation content strategy
By Stephanie Blotner
Tips to help engineering teams produce high-quality documentation—with or without the support of designated technical writers.
While there are a lot of materials about how to write code and how to deploy distributed systems, there's much less about how humans can work together more effectively to achieve their goals faster. This stuff is complicated and it matters. Version control, code review, pager rotations, devops practices. Increment exists to provide practical and useful insight into what effective teams are doing so the rest of us can learn from them more quickly.
Increment is published by Stripe.
DocumentationThis issue of Increment explores documentation as an approachable, essential, and innovative part of engineering culture. More about this issue
Tips to help engineering teams produce high-quality documentation—with or without the support of designated technical writers.
How Glossier used a reader-centric approach to simplify their development team’s code deployment process and improve velocity.
Good internal documentation leads to more stable and innovative development, and a better experience for users and developers alike. Here’s a look at some best practices, and how engineering orgs can make documentation a part of their culture.
If you’re interested in getting involved with open source, contributing to documentation is a good—and helpful—place to start.
Effective post-mortem documentation can improve the incident response process—and save on-call developers lost sleep.
Making your documentation work for users with vastly different needs is a challenge. Here’s how spaCy, an open-source library for natural language processing, did it.
The long and short of the perks and pitfalls of using bug-tracking systems as central repositories for internal documentation.
As documentation evolves beyond the written word, what will its future look like? Three expert tech writers and communicators share their takes on what was, what is, and what they think will be.
A look at historical technical documentation—from guidelines for building Noah’s ark to using early computers like the BINAC—and the parallels we see in the docs of today.
Nuclear power plants. Medical devices. Airplanes. Self-driving cars. Developing software for safety-critical projects takes documentation to the next level.
Solving problems in software development is not unlike finding your way out of a maze. Consider how documentation might reflect the twists and turns you faced along way—not just the end result.