~/talk

Always complete, never finished

Talkat Write the Docs Portland 2021 · 2021-04-25..04-27· [developer-experience]
slides:none on file

Argues that documentation should be always complete but never finished by growing in tiny iterative steps rather than big plans. Shows a concrete project: a Python camera model turned into Sphinx docs on readthedocs that attract 120 stars on GitHub, and a large refactor of pytest docs done by many small commits and fast merges. Claims the method reduces wasted rework, produces useful publishable material at every step, and succeeds where monolithic restructuring fails.

AI-written summary · about

  1. 0:00Introduction
  2. 0:58Documentation authoring framework
  3. 1:50The bookcase
  4. 6:19Planning
  5. 9:50Documentation
  6. 10:46Trap
  7. 11:11Always complete never finished
  8. 11:31Wellformed growth
  9. 14:59Lessons for documentation
  10. 15:57Workflow of iterative evolution
  11. 18:28New documentation
  12. 23:15Out of hand
  13. 24:09Back to documentation
  14. 25:05PiTest
  15. 31:07Getting out of planning process
  16. 32:19Fake plans
  17. 33:27Good Docs
  18. 35:26Framework
  19. 37:27Scale
  20. 38:52Conclusion
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