Andrew Spittle

I’m at Write the Docs today in Budapest and will be post­ing notes from ses­sions through­out the day. These are all posted right after a talk fin­ishes so they’re rough around the edges.

Fintan kicked off the longer talks after lightning talks. He works as a writer at Red Hat and focused on where community documentation meets product documentation. His talk explored whether a community could write your proper, official documentation.

As writers we never have enough time to pursue all the projects we want to accomplish. The community Fintan works with has written about 1,000 pages of the 6,000 total pages of documentation. While the community’s documentation lives in a Confluence Wiki the official Red Hat documentation needs to live in DocBook. The community wiki gives a low barrier to contributing an pairs instant publication with plain text editing. DocBook, on the other hand, is more complex to edit but presents good formats for archiving docs and has a rich markup vocabulary.

They rely upon a commercial tool to convert the Confluence wiki information to DocBook. Simply converting the content, though, isn’t enough. There’s still a distinction between community documentation and corporate documentation. What they run in to in this process is:

• Variable quality in community docs. There might be different formatting, styles, or more.
• Community documentation frequently has different versioning.
• Community documentation may have inappropriate content, links, and more. Things like untested features you’re not yet supporting.

Given that, Red Hat goes through a process for synchronizing their community and product docs. They use a separate repository for each and maintain a series of snapshots for both sets. These are stored in their version control system. Ideally these sets stay close to each other. In reality, though, after a couple releases the two sets diverge quite a bit.

What they’ve done is simply compare the community docs with an automated diff tool and then merge those changes in to the current product docs. It trades a bit of manual labor for less divergent doc sets.

Ultimately bringing in community documentation from open source projects is tough, but worth it. The different formats, tone, and necessary information can take time to sort out but eventually gives you a much stronger base to work from.

I’m at Write the Docs today in Budapest and will be post­ing notes from ses­sions through­out the day. These are all posted right after a talk fin­ishes so they’re rough around the edges.

Elizabeth wrapped up the talks before lunch in talking about blogging as non-traditional support docs. For WordPress.com the traditional documentation exists as a sprawling support site with hundreds of docs. The support staff primarily writes and maintains the docs.

Blogs help document things for readers in a few ways. First, they let readers subscribe and provide an incremental introduction to various topics. Email updates are occasional prompts to keep learning for new users.

Second, it turns documentation in to conversation. Readers can comment on the posts and interact directly with staff. That feedback loop can help guide future iterations.

Also, blogs have authors. Users know who the writer of a document is. It can help create an ongoing relationship between staff and users that’s based around creativity and proactive support rather than merely troubleshooting. That aspect can also expand the pool of people writing your docs. People have a better frame of reference for how to write a blog post than a support doc. At WordPress.com this means that the person launching a new feature or theme writes the initial support doc as well as the announcement post.

Blogs also give you a fresh start to your documentation. It’s easier to start a new blog than to overhaul an existing support site which means experimentation comes more easily. What you learn from blogging can then be applied to the documentation.

The two main ways this happens is through the main News Blog and through the Daily Post. The News Blog focuses on new feature announcements, company activity, and highlighting less popular or well known features. The Daily Post hosts weekly writing and photo challenges as well as focusing on more task-based instruction. In the last couple of months the Editorial Team has also put together a couple ebooks that focus on things like Photography 101. The material comes straight from blog posts over the months and acts as a great resource for new users.

An example Elizabeth highlighted was the Zero to Hero program started in January. Alongside each challenge there was an open forum thread for questions and comments. By the end of the month participants published 48 times as often as a randomly selected control group.

I’m at Write the Docs today in Budapest and will be post­ing notes from ses­sions through­out the day. These are all posted right after a talk fin­ishes so they’re rough around the edges.

Christine works at Atlassian, makers of Jira and other software tools for software developers. Their design team has grown from 5 to 30 over the last couple of years. On the whole Atlassian has focused a lot on the user experience of their products. Traditionally their tech writing has played a more formal or traditional role. They saw an opportunity to work together toward shared goals. Both are trying to reach users and give them a really great experience, they just use different tools.

A few of the design principles the docs team brought over to their work were to be familiar, to grow with users, and to give clarity to users. Those drive the decisions their design team makes. They realized those goals are easily adapted to documentation. Personas also play a role for both their design and docs team. The design team did a yearlong project to develop those personas. These make it easy for different teams to have common ground in how to build their software for their users.

The docs team realized in this process that designers have access to lots of customer information. They have interviews, site visits, usability tests, usage information on existing features, and a long-term roadmap for the product. All of that can help a docs team build documentation that’s relevant for users.

The documentation process for Atlassian starts in user testing. Designers test new prototypes with users and the docs team uses information from those tests to guide their documentation edits. They piggyback analytics on to this for hard data as well.

The first tool the docs team borrowed from the design team was empathy maps. Empathy maps help bring focus on the user. You can use them to workshop how a user might feel in a “before and after” situation. You take the “after” situation and work backward.

Another tool they’ve borrowed is sparring sessions. They’re basically a critique session that brings group thinking in to design and planning. It’s a check that the goals have been met with a given prototype. The goal is to assure design quality by critiquing design early and often. Prior to a sparring session they send out a draft of the doc as well as a brief or outline that covers the goals of a document. A few tips they’ve learned the hard way:

• Timebox, timebox, timebox! Set a timer so you don’t go down rabbit holes.
• If your team is given to negativity, try a positives-only 5 minutes.
• Try to make sure everyone is heard. You can use a checklist or give everyone 1 minute to list feedback.
• Leave with at least 3 action items. The onus is on the writer to take action on these things.

6-ups are another workshopping tool they’ve borrowed. They drive focus on ideal solutions and get you out of “word-thinking” and can be a good way to build on each others’ ideas. Sometimes the best way to communicate an idea is to sketch it and really illustrate what a user will be seeing for a given feature.

User stores are an additional tool. It’s about figuring out how a user is going to go through a product. It charts a path through goals and actions within a product. Going through that path can help you spot where users will hit pain points and fall out of the flow.

They made all this happen by finding the right projects. They looked for a team that finds value in design and writing as well as a designer who sees the value in docs. It helps to look for a new project that’s running lean and has some momentum. Projects that are data-driven are also beneficial as it helps cement and validate the work you’re putting in to these sessions.

I’m at Write the Docs today in Budapest and will be post­ing notes from ses­sions through­out the day. These are all posted right after a talk fin­ishes so they’re rough around the edges.

Sebastien was the first talk after break. He works on Apache CloudStack and is a committer to the Apache project.

Apache CloudStack moved from an old documentation tool, Publican and DocBook, to Read the Docs. They wanted to bring in a greater sense of community with their documentation and make it more accessible.

The old tool, Publican, is a build tool for documentation written in the DocBook format. DocBook itself is a XML schema suited for books and papers; it’s not necessarily meant for web-based docs. The editing tools, though, are either technical like vi or expensive. For an open source project that’s a no-go. They were also running in to issues around localization, internationalization, hosting, and attracting new writers.

Using Read the Docs they were able to move toward using reStructuredText for writing. It’s an easy-to-read, WYSIWYG plain text markup syntax parser. The problem, though, is that they had 40,000 lines of XML to transform in to reStructuredText. Their lifesaver was pandoc. This let them convert all the files without needing to rewrite everything.

Sphinx allows them to build their documentation sites and projects. The hosting is handled through Read the Docs. One of the killer features for them was the button on each doc that let people edit on GitHub. Given that Apache CloudStack’s goal was to increase their contributor base this was vital. It dropped the barrier to entry for new contributors. They’re now starting to see drive-by contributions to docs, which is great.

The one last hurdle for them is translation. With large communities in China and Japan it’s key for the project to make translation easy. Handily, with Sphinx, they can do this. They use the same tool that Markus talked about yesterday. They now have more people contributing translations than they do documentation.

Ultimately changing documentation format gave Apache CloudStack docs which were good looking, easy to contribute to, supportive of localization, and much much more.

I’m at Write the Docs today in Budapest and will be post­ing notes from ses­sions through­out the day. These are all posted right after a talk fin­ishes so they’re rough around the edges.

Robert focused on how to write good learning material. We all suffer from ed-tech amnesia, in Robert’s words. There’s a huge body of research on how to teach people and how they learn material. In researching this talk he found that while there’s a huge body of material it is wildly arcane to us as technical people.

Robert works at the Open Tech School where they work to teach students programming. The workshops are done collaboratively with lots of hands-on coaching.

The first step in learning and collaborating is defining clear goals. You need to know where you want to go with the material; beginning with the end in mind helps greatly. There’s a difference between tutorials and references. References may seek to exhaustively document an API while tutorials consciously explain a single concept with an end goal defined.

Collaboration, though, can kill cohesion. With many people involved you have to actively protect the scope of learning material. At the Open Tech School they have someone who acts as the champion of learning documentation and they seek keep work tied closely to learning objectives.

When you use the right tools and lightweight markup you can lower the barrier to learning. For the Open Tech School this means using Jekyll and hosting files on GitHub Pages.

One thing that they haven’t found a good solution for is dealing with dependency hell. When teaching people how to code you run in to issues where the prerequisites for solving a given problem can involve setting up handfuls of other, irrelevant, dependencies. When teaching kids they’ve tried using system images that bundle those dependency requirements so students can write code and have it run right out of the box, mostly.

Another thing they have struggled with in their material is the amount of repetition. Repeating things is good, but at the same time you want to be concise so that students don’t skip over repeated material.

One guideline that is extremely useful for new coaches is to tell them the keyboard of students is made of lava. Too many new coaches cannot suppress the impulse to just fix one thing for the student. The problem is that this disrupts the student’s flow and attention. On top of that nudging new coaches to use socratic questioning can greatly help. Your students will benefit if you don’t just give them the answers.

At the Open Tech School they’ve found that feedback is great but that it’s mostly positive from students. Instead they focus on asking the coaches for feedback on where students struggle. It helps them spot the gaps and shortcomings in their documentation and learning material.

Finally, they’ve published all of their coaching guidelines.