2.6 KiB
2.6 KiB
title | weight |
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Towards Great Documentation: Behind a CNCF-Led Docs Audit | 4 |
A talk about the backstage documentation audit and what makes a good documentation.
Opening
- 2012 the year of the mayan calendar and the mainstream success of memes
- The classic meme RTFM -> Classic manuals were pretty long
- 2024: Manuals have become documentation (hopefully with better contents)
What gets us to good documentation
What is documentation
- Docs (the raw descriptions, qucikstart and how-to)
- Website (the first impression - what does this do, why would i need it)
- REAMDE (the github way of website + docs)
- CONTRIBUTING (Is this a one-man show)
- Issues
- Meta docs (how do we orchestrate things)
Project documentation
- Who needs this documentation?
- New users -> Optimize for minimum context
- Experienced users
- User roles (Admins, end users, ...) -> Seperate into different pages (Get started based in your role)
- What do we need to enable with this documentation?
- Prove value fast -> Why this project?
- Educate on fundemental aspects
- Showcase features/uses cases
- Hands-on enablement -> Tutorials, guides, step-by-step
Contributor documentation
- Communication channels have to be clearly marked
- Documented scheduled contributor meetings
- Getting started guides for new contributors
- Project governance
- Who is gonna own it?
- What will happen to my PR?
- Who maintains features?
Website
- Single source for all pages (one repo that includes landing, docs, api and so on) -> Easier to contribute
- Usability (especially on mobile)
- Social proof and case studies -> Develop trust
- SEO (actually get found) and analytics (detect how documentation is used and where people leave)
- Plan website maintenance
What is great documetnation
- Project docs helps users according to their needs -> Low question to answer latency
- Contributor docs enables contributions in a predictable manner -> Don't leave "when will this be reviewed/mered" questions open
- Website proves why anyone should invest time in this projects?
- All documetnation is connected and up to date
General best practices
- Insular pages: One page per topic, preferably short
- Include API reference
- Searchable
- Plan for versioning early on (the right framework is important)
- Plan for localization
Examples
- Opentelemetry: Split by role (dev, ops)
- Prometheus:
- New user conent in intro (concept) and getting started (practice)
- Hierarchie includes concepts, key features and guides/tutorials
Q&A
- Every last wednesday in the month is a cncf echnical writers meetin (cncf slack -> techdocs)