Documentation used to support the product. Today, it’s fundamental to the product experience, especially as AI becomes the primary way people learn, search, and decide. For many users, documentation is the first (and sometimes only) way they evaluate, adopt, and successfully use what you’ve built. As the use of AI has grown, documentation has also … continue reading
What happens when you don’t have any instructions to follow? The board game “City of the Six Moons” plays with this concept, giving players a box of components and an instruction booklet in an alien language, and lets players figure out how it works. Hollandspiele, the game’s designers, say on their website: You will never … continue reading
Google is attempting to make it easier for developers to access its documentation by creating the Developer Knowledge API and corresponding MCP server, both now in public preview. The Developer Knowledge API allows developers to search and retrieve documentation for Google’s services in Markdown. This includes documentation from firebase.google.com, developer.android.com, docs.cloud.google.com, and more. The two … continue reading
Stack Overflow is following up its recent Developer Survey with a follow-up survey of 800+ developers to find out which development tasks are causing them the most frustration. The original survey found that 84% of developers use or planned to use AI in their development workflows, but that they often were frustrated when AI gives … continue reading
JetBrains is hoping to improve the way technical documentation is created with a new tool called Writerside. Currently in an Early Access Program, Writerside is a platform for writing and collaborating on documentation, API references, tutorials, developer guides, and how-tos. It can be used as a plugin in the JetBrains IDE or as a standalone … continue reading
Code documentation has never been considered fun. Maybe it’s time we changed that. Documenting your code is often seen as an arduous, yet necessary chore. For many developers, this process is time-consuming and brain-draining – which is the complete opposite of how it’s supposed to be. A core part of the documentation process – creating … continue reading
What is documentation? Why is it important? What makes it good or bad? And – if it’s bad – what are the consequences? In this article, I’ll discuss all of this, explain how documentation (good or bad) is an outgrowth of organizational culture, and suggest some ways you can work to improve culture and produce … continue reading
Testing and the SDLC have evolved as a result of continuous integration and deployment becoming a popular method at organizations, but moving forward, organizations need to apply the same principles to documentation to keep developers up to speed. This is according to the newly released Continuous Documentation Manifesto written by Omer Rosenbaum, the CTO at … continue reading
Swimm, a developer onboarding and team collaboration tool provider, announced that it raised $5.7 million in seed funding and also launched its platform for sharing information about codebases. The round of funding was led by Pitango First alongside TAU Ventures, Axon Ventures, Fundfire, as well as angel investors that included the founder of Snyk. The … continue reading
Few tasks can make a developer groan more than the process of documenting their code. As important as documentation is, it’s a task that has always gotten set as a low priority for developers, which leads to problems down the line. Postman’s 2019 State of API survey found that over half of respondents felt that … continue reading
Stack Overflow is retiring Documentation on August 8. While Stack Overflow had high hopes for the new initiative, their research showed new users weren’t coming to Documentation, and they needed a larger team to fix Documentation for developers. According to a Stack Overflow entry: “After August 8, 2017 at 1700 UTC, we’ll disable proposed changes … continue reading
As open-source software continues to become a critical part of the software industry, GitHub wants to ensure the community understands the pervasive landscape. The organization recently released an open set of data designed to help researchers, data enthusiasts and open-source members comprehend the overall needs of the community. Some of the major findings highlight how valued documentation … continue reading
