Daniele Prodica
What nobody tells you about documentation

Discussion: Issue #203

However hard you work on documentation, it won’t work for your software - unless you do it the right way.

There is a secret that needs to be understood in order to write good software documentation: there isn’t one thing called documentation, there are four.

They are: tutorials, how-to guides, explanation and technical reference. They represent four different purposes or functions, and require four different approaches to their creation. Understanding the implications of this will help improve most software documentation - often immensely.

Discussion

We pretty much unanomously agreed that despite the effort and the best intentions that went into it, our internal documentation could use a few improvements here and there. Actually, we’ve scheduled a few tasks already due to this talk.

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