Engineering
My Documentation Wake-Up Call This Week

From writing just-for-me notes to documenting for users, devs, and contributors

2/24/20263 views
Stack of paper documents as a metaphor for messy documentation

This week I revisited how I write docs.

Usually I only document things like:

  • what the project is,
  • how to use it,
  • and what I learned while building it.

That helped me a lot, but I realized it was still incomplete.

After reading the Write the Docs beginner guide, I noticed something important: documentation is not only for users, and not only for future me. It should also help developers and contributors understand how to work with the project.

So moving forward, I want to write docs for three groups:

  1. Users — how to use the product clearly.
  2. Developers — how the project works and how to set it up.
  3. Contributors — how to contribute without guessing.

My baseline principle still stays the same:

If I can come back to my own project and understand it again in a few minutes, the docs are doing their job.

Source: https://www.writethedocs.org/guide/writing/beginners-guide-to-docs/