Docs-as-Ecosystem: The Community Approach to Engineering Documentation Alejandra Quetzalli Author

Any modern organization or Open-Source (OSS) community understands that investing in engineering documentation (Docs) means investing in their community’s user experience. And that’s smart business. This book teaches technical audiences of any skill level how the doc-as-code model empowers developers, product managers, leadership, and communities to better understand their favorite products and OSS technologies. You can’t ship a product without testing each line of code. You also can’t afford to ship a product that you won’t be actively maintaining, or you’ll wind up with angry customers. And you certainly wouldn’t ship a product without hiring an entire team of designers, engineers, copywriters, product managers, and beyond. Yet time and time again, Docs are thrown aside as an afterthought or considered only a nice to have. This book demonstrates how such thinking is outdated and why designing developer documentation as a product makes sense. In this book, you’ll learn far more than how to write API Docs or tutorials. You’ll acquire skills for incorporating a responsive, inclusive, and accessible design in a documentation site. You’ll also learn how to design user flows, information architecture, and content buckets for different kinds of users so that anyone can easily navigate, browse and discover content in your Docs. You’ll even learn about the difference in work processes between maintaining Docs for a product versus an OSS technology. Finally, you’ll discover the secrets to creating public style guides, managing technical writers, retrieving user feedback, setting up Docs analytics, and building a thriving community around Docs. What You’ll Learn • Examine accessibility and the user experience • Understand Information architecture • Review docs-as-code processes • Manage technical writers • Oversee OSS Docs contributions • Retrieve and integrate user feedback • Build Docs and Education communities Who This Book is For Developers of all levels, VPs of Product/Engineering, Product Managers, and Designers,