Documentation

Every now and then along comes a piece of software that just does pretty much everything right, one of these is Dash.

I have loved Kapeli's offline documentation browser, Dash for a while now and have been intending to start contributing to it for the best part of 2015.

Read on to see what one DZone Zone Leader learned at the iTake conference, including new perspectives on testing, BDD, security, and mob programming.

With the latest update, Postman now allows access to monitoring, documentation, mock servers, and other API features for users of its free version.

With GraphQL and tools like it, do you still need to manually document anything? Or can you fire your tech writers right away? Let's check in a real codebase!

In this post, we take a look at a new version of Markdown, DocFX Flavored Markdown, and how it can be used to create documentation for REST APIs.

Are you using the Sublime Text editor? If so, you may want to rethink this. One man gives his opinion on Sublime and gives several other options you can choose from.

If you've wanted a spell checker or autocorrect that simply does more, check out how this tool is bein used to check for tense and syle as well.

Kauri is passionate about improving developer documentation and experience. At the moment we are working to do this in the Ethereum and Web3 space, in the longer term future we hope to do the same with other open source technologies. We do this with our content platform and helping fund and mentor project documentation improvements. For example, until April 30th we are helping fund documentation improvements to ENS and Plasma Group (components) as part of the Ethereal hackathon.

Documentation structure applies to your documentation as a whole, and to each page. Let's start at the top and work down.

What's one of the first things you look at when you look at using a new project?

I appreciate that not everyone who writes documentation is a native English speaker, or even if they are, may not understand the best way to write clearly and concisely. Many native English speakers had our last grammar lesson more than 20 years ago, and have learnt the tips and tricks we now use as professional writers recently. There are three important things to remember to justify the time and effort of making your writing more understandable:

I ran a live stream a while back where I looked at new features in

I won’t repeat any famous phrases about how pictures equalling a quantity of words, I think we all understand the potential power of a good visual. Well considered images in documentation can help illustrate a concept, clarify a complex idea, or show a reader what they can expect from undertaking certain steps.

When comparing products, you want to decide on their usefulness. Yet, we often forget to evaluate the project's documentation. A project might offer an excellent set of features but might lack easy-to-use documentation. This can have a detrimental effect on the developer experience and your team's efficiency. So, how do you evaluate the developer experience of documentation?

The discussions on what represents negative, biased, and diverse language continue in many open source communities, often sparking heated and strongly opinionated debate. Setting those discussions aside, say you have decided what language you want to increase, decrease, or change in your community. How do you enforce and track those changes?

A while ago I made a video on Mermaid, the markdown-style syntax for creating diagrams and charts. It's still one of my more popular videos, and it needs an update. In the meantime, the people at Mermaid Chart, a new commercial company formed by some of Mermaid's original creators, reached out to show me their platform. So in this post, I take a look at what it adds on top of the default Mermaid syntax.

API documentation is generally predictable, follows common patterns, and is one of the least interesting tasks in a documentation project. It's also a task with a degree of pre-existing automatic generation tools and practices. It sounds like a perfect use case for AI-assistive tools! In this post, I look at general and specialized tools for generating API documentation from code and text-based prompts. I also cover potential problems and pitfalls in generated docs and how to test the generated output to ensure its accuracy.

There aren't many desktop tools for technical writing that are native to macOS and iPadOS. adoc Studio is one of the few, built specifically around AsciiDoc. I covered it before, and the team has been busy since. Here's what's new in versions 4 and 5, including export options, accessibility tools, multilingual support, and AI features.