How To Create Great Documentation

If Spotify isn’t available in your country, you can use another podcasting app to access the episode!

It’s easy to overlook documentation when building an application, but documentation can make or break a consumer’s experience. Today we’re diving into the world of documentation to discuss what it takes to write good documentation, the ethics of documentation, and some popular tools you can use to get started.

 

Sponsors.

A huge thank you to our sponsors for supporting the Ladybug Podcast! Interested in becoming a Ladybug Podcast sponsor? Head over to our Sponsorship page for more details.

 

How often have you struggled to learn programming because you just couldn’t find the right resource to suit your learning style? I struggled for nearly a year before stumbling upon a website known as Frontend Masters. I’ve been a long-time paid user of the online learning platform simply because I find the courses to be comprehensive and beginner-friendly. They have the best teachers in the tech industry and they’re one of the reasons I was able to land my dream job.

With Frontend Masters you can learn web development, responsive design, back-end development, animations, testing, algorithms, data structures and more. You can pick a course you’re interested in or follow one of the learning paths like React, Vue, Angular, data visualization with D3, node.js and more.

To learn more head to frontendmasters.com.

 

Swimm helps your dev team stay in sync with code. Swimm solves a huge recurring pain for engineering teams - quickly building up R&D knowledge, and keeping it auto-maintained and aligned with the code by integrating continuous documentation into the development lifecycle.

Swimm’s platform streamlines code-coupled content (walkthroughs, guides and more) into the CI/CD, and keeps it up to date with a unique auto-sync algorithm. That way, tribal knowledge and documentation stays with the source code, fresh and up to date every time the code evolves. Developers deserve documentation that they can trust, and this is only possible through correctness, freshness and relevance.

 

Show Notes.

  • 01:58 - Why does a company or app need good documentation?

  • 04:09 - Who do we write documentation for?

  • 06:01 - What makes good documentation?

  • 11:05 - Ethics of documentation

  • 32:47 - The structure of your documentation

  • 34:35 - What types of documentation should I write?

  • 40:22 - Documentation tools

  • 44:51 - Shoutouts

 
 

Transcript.

We provide transcripts for all of our episodes. You can find them here!

Previous
Previous

Diving Deep On Databases

Next
Next

Getting Started With TypeScript