Docs for Developers

de Jared Bhatti, Heidi Waterhouse

Learn to integrate the craft of writing with the craft of programming. This book teaches you how to create documentation for each step in the software development lifecycle, from understanding your user’s needs to publishing, measuring, and maintaining useful developer documentation. A well-documented project saves time for both developers on the project and users of the software, and projects without adequate documentation suffer from poor developer productivity, project scalability, user adoption, and accessibility. In short: bad documentation kills projects. Docs for Developers demystifies the process of creating great developer documentation, following a team of software developers as they work to launch a new product. At each step along the way, you learn through examples, templates, and principles how to create, measure, and maintain documentation, which you can adapt to the needs of your own organization. What You'll Learn Create friction logs and perform user research to understand your user’s frustrations Research, draft, and write different kinds of documentation, including READMEs, API documentation, tutorials, conceptual information, and release notes Define an information architecture for a larger set of documentation, optimized for search Publish and maintain documentation alongside regular code releases Measure the success of the content you create through analytics and user feedback Who This Book Is For Ideal for software developers tasked with creating documentation alongside code or for technical writers, developer advocates, product managers, and other technical roles that create and contribute to documentation for their products and systems. Technical managers will also find value in adapting their teams or organizations to improve software documentation practices.