Crafting Docs for Success

Developer documentation is an essential resource that provides developers with comprehensive information, guidance, and examples for effectively using APIs, frameworks, libraries, or software platforms. It’s also a powerful tool in developer relations because it provides all the necessary information during the onboarding process, keeps your users informed on changes and plans, and helps you maintain relationships with your users, build a community, and encourage collaboration. Using a design thinking approach, this book aims to provide an easy to follow blueprint for building successful developer documentation drawing from the valuable insights gained while building the award winning platformOS developer portal.

You’ll work with practical usable templates, workflows, and tools all validated and peer-reviewed by international experts in the fields of documentation, technical writing, developer relations, and UX design. This book reveals the many factors that have to be considered while crafting developer documentation, such as hitting the right target audience, designing a seamless onboarding experience, selecting the right workflows and data analysis methods. You’ll delve into this complex mix of topics, each with its unique considerations, and understand why it’s challenging for those working on developer documentation to grasp the entire process, including all essential ingredients, tools, and resources.

Crafting Docs for Success is your one stop resource for empowering your team and community to contribute and help maintain your documentation, as well as further improve diversity and inclusion.

What You’ll Learn

• Examine how user research facilitates documentation development
• Utilize design thinking, community-driven documentation, and Docs as Code
• Understand editorial workflows and what happens at each step
• Write a style guide from scratch and use it for content production
• Review how methods and strategies fall into place during technical implementation

Who This Book Is For

Documentation maintainers and managers, technical writers, developer relations practitioners and advocates, technical community managers, developer marketers, software developers and designers, and start-up founders, CTOs, and CEOs

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Approaches

Chapter 2: Foundations

Chapter 3: Editorial Workflow

Chapter 4: Content Production

Chapter 5: Implementation

Chapter 6: Community

Chapter 7: Accessibility and Inclusion

Chapter 8: Sustainability

Chapter 9: Team

Chapter 10: Measures of Success

Appendix: Tools and Resources

About the Author

Diana Lakatos is an experienced Developer Documentation Specialist dedicated to creating high-quality resources for developers. She has played an instrumental role in the development of the multiple award-winning platformOS Developer Portal, and manages all phases of the editorial workflow, creates templates, incorporates best practices, and writes, edits, and reviews content. She spoke about various aspects of building world-class developer docs at conferences like Write The Docs, tcworld, DevRelCon, and API The Docs.