Documentation as Empathy

Presentation from Open Source & Feelings.

Transcript

1. Open Source & Feelings Seattle October 3, 2015 Documentation as Empathy Eric Holscher (@ericholscher)
2. 7 years ago
3. I was writing Perl for the Military
4. No • Documentation • Version Control • Tests
5. It all started with a PDF
6. Serendipity • Feb 20: http://ericholscher.com/blog/ 2008/feb/20/job-hunt/ • Feb 21: https://jacobian.org/writing/ sailing-on/
7. Documentation Culture
8. People don’t use projects that don’t have docs
9. I start writing docs • Django Kong • Django Test Utils • Django Reusable App Docs
10. Jacob was a huge influence • 2009: https://jacobian.org/writing/great- documentation/ • 2011: http://pyvideo.org/video/403/ pycon-2011--writing-great-documentation
11. Created Read the Docs to reduce friction to writing & publishing docs
12. From Tool to Understanding
13. Read the Docs was started in 2010
15. Started Write the Docs in 2013
16. Learned about a whole community of writers
18. Documentation is more than a tool
19. Technical writers know what makes so ware understandable
20. More communities are valuing documentation
21. Documentation as guilt
22. Coding & Testing have objective results
23. Documentation is a “so skill”
24. All programmers feel guilt about this
25. Leads to putting off writing docs
26. We need to lower the barriers in our industry to writing documentation
27. Why it matters
28. Empathy
29. You don’t want a community full of people who don’t read documentation
30. Documentation is Outreach
32. My path is the path of many others
33. “I can’t say I’m self taught. I’ve been taught by the people who wrote the documentation” — @soulshake
34. Thanks writethedocs.org readthedocs.org