~/talk

Writing Good Documentation for Developers

Talkat PyCon US 2021 · 2021-05-14..05-15· [developer-experience]
slides:none on file

Developer docs are your UI, marketing, and product definition: an Anvil case shows Python in the browser and server, a drag‑and‑drop IDE, and hosting, and led to a concrete change—restructure the table of contents so questions like "does it store data" appear first rather than plugin folders. Distinguish reference vs API docs (story vs code objects), avoid javadoc disease, and surface community Q&A in Discourse or Stack Overflow so search fixes become documented patches.

AI-written summary · about

  1. 0:00Intro
  2. 0:14Writing Good Developer Docs
  3. 0:36Why do we care?
  4. 2:13Docs are content marketing.
  5. 3:03Docs define your product.
  6. 5:14Docs are your user interface.
  7. 6:25Types of Documentation
  8. 8:41API docs are not reference docs.
  9. 9:16Reference docs tell a story.
  10. 14:41Your user is on a journey.
  11. 17:52Talk to your users
  12. 19:04Questions are bug reports.
  13. 19:16Answers are patches.
  14. 20:14Explanation
~/search
type to search 6,249 conferences, 138,987 speakers and 185,172 talks
~/help
cmdctrl k
search every conference, speaker and series
/
focus the filter search
h
home
c
conferences
s
speakers
e
series
t
light / dark — the status bar button does the same
?
this help
esc
close this, then clear every filter — or just the search, while you are typing in it

Ignored while you are typing. Pages without a filter rail have no search to focus.