Four Ways to Improve Your Company’s Developer Documentation
How to build a company culture that values good developer documentation when you’re the only writer there.
It’s all on you to turn mounds of garbage into gold. That’s been my experience being a lone technical writer for over a decade, writing for companies such as Schneider Electric, Elastic Path, and Atlassian. Companies have piles of garbage developer documentation and then hire one technical writer to fix it all. And worse, while you are fixing, all the developers, QAs, and product managers keep dumping crap onto the pile.
For you to make it all perfect is a ridiculous, Sisyphean task that’s doomed to failure.
That is unless you execute these four key strategies.
1. Build a Village
First things first. You need to accept that you can’t manage all these documents on your own. Don’t be a Hans Brinker. Trust me, I’ve been him and it ain’t fun. Running around, plugging all these knowledge gaps in thousands of documents, and nobody gives a damn if the whole thing comes crashing down on you cause…
