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.

Swizec wrapped up the second day of talks. He writes code and books. The latter is the story he told.

The publisher found him after Swizec wrote a short blog post about displaying dots through d3.js. About a month after the blog post he got a book proposal via India. That was October of 2012. He quickly read the spec for d3.js and faked his way through an outline. The “good” news was that the publisher liked the outline and signed a contract for the book.

Then came the writing of a book. He outlined this as a 4 step process

1. Think about it. Decide what you can cover in Chapter 1 that doesn’t require you to say, “This will be explained later.”
2. Learn about it. Read the API spec, figure it out.
3. Code it. Prove that you’ve actually learned something; it’s a means of testing your writing.
4. Write about it. Pull it all together and synthesize the experience.

The nice thing is that writing about something you’ve already learned how to code can be extremely easy. Finishing the book becomes about repeating that cycle for each and every chapter.

After 66 days and 171 hours of writing Swizec had a 179 page book. He was sick of the book by that time but was happy that it was done. Then came the editing. While he was happy with the book the publisher came back with, “We love it!…but not really.” They wanted him to shorten the book by 60 pages. Swizec then rewrote everything. While he didn’t have to make new examples he essentially rewrote every piece. He killed the beautiful turns of phrase, jokes, and other pieces that made writing fun. Throughout the editing process he relied heavily upon On Writing Well.

That was the major rewrite. He then did another minor rewrite of additional typos and fixes. Unfortunately then the technical editors got back with their feedback and suggested even further rewrites to the technical examples in the book. Luckily by this point publication was so soon he refused to do deep structural changes. The book was published in October of 2013, one year after starting. After 12 months and 333 hours it somehow ended up being 194 pages long. It shipped on his birthday.

After publication he didn’t get much information, just a quarterly report of sales and royalties. It’s sold about 1,000 copies so far.

Overall Swizec learned that publishers are difficult to work with and that books can be the best way to learn a piece of software. Writing a book is a hard, humbling slog and is truly a fight.

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.

Mikey’s talk took the concepts of agile software development and focused on how they can apply to writing. She works at Red Hat and lives in the Czech Republic. In a previous role she was a scrum master in an agile environment.

Mikey started her talk with a brief background or history of agile development. Traditionally software development relied upon a waterfall process. While this process worked well for physical factory production it didn’t work as well for digital software. All of a sudden we didn’t have time any more. The delivery time for software had to be faster and faster; users are impatient. The shift was toward more incremental, iterative development. This led to agile. Agile goes through the design, code, test, ship process multiple times rather than in one monolithic cycle. The key is to be flexible and adapt to whatever environment you work within. There are 4 key principles to agile development:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. While there is value in processes and tools the people you work with come first.
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Docs are still okay, though, you just want to ensure they’re granular and not monolithic.
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. As a writer you want to hear what the customer has to say and make docs a first class citizen in the software.
4. Responding to change over following a plan. The key is to stay aware of what’s coming down the line and shipping every day in the code.

The flexibility in this is how agile relates to writing docs. As a writer you’re thrown in to an environment that you must adapt to. Staying ahead of the code helps ensure your docs never get swamped by current releases.

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.

Kristof, who helped make this conference happen, is an evangelist in the Drupal community. His talk focused on documentation in a post-agile world. Given the more hectic nature of agile software development ensuring that your documentation is up to date is quite difficult. You end up maintaining multiple versions of documents, sometimes writing docs for features which haven’t yet shipped or even been finished in code. You know the docs will fail at some point, the question is when.

The trick, though, is that developers already solved these complexities in the shift to agile development. On the software side developers have automated aspects of QA in order to speed up deployment. Kristof believes we can take that same mindset to docs. You can do this by either merging docs in to tests or embedding tests in to docs. Both are difficult.

In DITA documentation is broken up in to references, tasks, and concepts. References are written in code or extracted from from code. Common examples are documentation around API functions; these become easy to test. Tasks let you document automated execution in your project. Concepts let you address places where terminology may change between two versions of your code. Using embedded RDFa or a thesaurus extractor you could try and ensure your code and documentation agree.

Kristof also talked a bit about building the ultimate user guide to the internet. This stems from his project WalkHub. The concept is that online tools and sites often require us to absorb too much information. Luckily, though, there is a shortcut; it’s about cognitive load reduction. People have a limited amount of working memory and if you dump too much information on them they’ll overload.

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.