D(ocs)&D(evelopment): Finding the Perfect Party for Your Documentation...
summary
Grafana documents Tempo (open-source tracing DB) by pairing Field Engineers and Technical Writers, running a bi-weekly 4-hour cadence to turn hands-on demos into docs-as-code PRs tracked in source repos. Workflow uses bash, kubectl, jq, Postman and mindmaps; outcomes include merged PRs, readership spikes in telemetry docs and adoption of the model across Grafana’s telemetry products after ~3 years. The team publishes the writers toolkit, prioritizes user tasks, chunks work, invites community reviewers, and experiments with LLMs with strict vetting.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (12)
- 0:00Grafana and Tempo intro
- 3:10Documentation team via D&D
- 7:01Skills for tech writers
- 11:13Bi-weekly doc cadence
- 16:50Daily Tempo docs workflow
- 21:21Publish docs and feedback
- 24:08Phases of documentation for different user types
- 27:13User contributions to docs
- 31:29AI tools for docs caution
- 35:01Engineers write minimal docs
- 37:49Review docs consistently
- 40:38Q&A
related talks
44mHow Grafana Labs Builds and Sustains Communities
17mOpenTelemetry Looks Good To Me: Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir
39mOpen Docs, Open Collaboration: Building Better Documentation with Community PRs
35mHelping Your Community Contribute to Developer Documentation
32mBridge the Gap To OSS Adoption With Documentation: A Kubernetes Story
28mImprove Monitoring and Observability for Kubernetes with OSS Tools
40mDocs Tools for OSS Maintainers
33mOSS Documentation Workshop