Docs for Developers: How to start when everything is hard
summary
Practical steps for getting usable API docs: gather loose documentation from tickets, wikis, runbooks, then triage and connect what’s current; scope work to what this team can actually deliver and start where it hurts (login flows, onboarding, integrations) rather than auto-generating every endpoint. Aim for good enough documentation you can iterate on and pick a single source of truth. Concrete benchmarks: learn from Stripe’s copy‑paste runnable examples and note the surprising finding that feature flags usage showed 10x more permanent ops feature flags than rollout flags.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:48Developers need better docs
- 3:15Know your audience
- 5:01Good API documentation
- 7:50Scope documentation
- 9:14Fix painful gaps first
- 10:39Goal of good enough docs
- 11:03Organize existing docs
- 12:49Choose documentation platform
- 13:52Why documentation is never truly done
- 14:52Seek professional help
- 16:18Introducing Docs for Developers
- 18:46Advice for overwhelmed devs
- 20:53Understand real user needs
- 21:13Encourage users to read docs
- 22:37Speaker’s role evolution
- 24:02Closing remarks & Q&A
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