alex VS docs

Catch insensitive, inconsiderate writing with tools like alex

This story has been a motivating principle behind my life for a long time, and therefore, whenever I've worked on docs, I've thought about how I could ensure that exclusionary words, even unintentionally, did not make their way into the final copy. During my time at Nexmo, a communications API company, I introduced Alex, an NPM package that helps you identify potentially exclusionary language in your writing, into the CI/CD pipeline for the documentation.

As a philosophy student: Zotero for reference management, the Better BibTeX plugin to auto-generate a .bib file, and two language servers for diagnostics: LTeX for grammar- and spellchecking, and alex for style and sensitivity checking.

When using it as a lib you can pass a markdown string (https://github.com/get-alex/alex#markdownvalue-config) or raw text string (https://github.com/get-alex/alex#textvalue-config). This will return an object that should contain everything you need to perform a naive replacement.

alex is a lovely command-line tool that takes in text or markdown files and, using retext-equality and retext-profanities, highlights suggestions for improvement. alex checks for gendered work titles, gendered proverbs, ableist language, condescending or intolerant language, profanities, and much more.

Heck, he could even go so far and start using GitHub's automation system (Actions) to run some check on his writing. (Maybe something like alexjs)

I've been a part of several code clean-ups where giant code bases needed to be changed to considerate language. I've never once encountered a bad actor when the actual work got underway. Part of being a programmer is to question the reasoning behind large changes but any programmer worth their salt understands the big picture if you can clearly explain it. I wouldn't read too much into the actions of a few people in any programming subreddit who are opposed to pronouns. Those people will always exist. I'm certain that the vast majority of programmers in those subs are either strongly in favour of gendered pronouns or are apathetic toward it. To drive home the point, the fight for considerate language has been driven by developers themselves. All these wonderful tools such as alex.js or even org level changes inside big companies are part of it.

alex

I can recommend https://linode.com, their documentation is excellent https://www.linode.com/docs/ and ready made images also https://www.linode.com/docs/marketplace/

>In other words, let the machine do your thinking for you No, this was idiotic. A generator tool like Hugo doesn't "think" for you. it's a tool, used by a thinking person. Even if someone new to HTML publishing happens to adopt Hugo, they are going to learn things. By the sounds of it, it's likely they will learn things you have not. They will still learn about HTML and CSS. They may optionally learn about optimizing their HTML and CSS, if it matters for performance of their finished product. Not all sites are the same, after all. The output of Hugo is static HTML (and CSS, js if used, images and other supporting files). The input of Hugo is also static - a collection of HTML templates, CSS and, usually, Markdown text files as the primary content store. Creatively used, Hugo sites can appear as feature-rich as many database-driven sites and in a manner that you simply could not do armed with only an editor, unless your site is only a handful of pages. Any Hugo site can be configured to generate other representations of the site, too, automatically. You probably think that's nonsense, but then again you probably also do not publish a hand--crafted [Atom](https://spf13.com/index.xml) or RSS feed to go along with your hand-crafted HTML. Hand-crafted does not automatically mean better. Even the simplest Hugo site implementation typically makes use of categories or tags (or both) to help readers find other relevant content. Inserting a new page into an existing hierarchy of categories and/or tags is trivial. Edit a file; tag it. The navigation structure is rebuilt, in milliseconds, whether there are five pages or five hundred. [Steve Francia's site](https://spf13.com/) provides examples of these facets in use. With Hugo you can also produce large documentation sites/subsites, and even more importantly, maintain them. The [Let's Encrypt documentation site](https://letsencrypt.org/docs/) is a textbook case study. It's too bad the `vim` project DOES NOT use a tool like Hugo, because then its documentation would stand a chance of being current instead of: > The [VimDoc project](https://www.vim.org/docs.php) has links to various types of Vim documentation. The online, hyperlinked copy of the documentation is currently outdated. Send in the drones to edit. "Currently" has lasted a long time! Another example: [Linode's documentation site](https://www.linode.com/docs/) is generated by Hugo (according to the meta attribute inside, v0.83). You can see the source code for all their documentation, including the site theme and Hugo specifics, here https://github.com/linode/docs. Shocking, isn't it? A tool being used for productivity! You portray using a productivity tool like Hugo as being somehow lazy. That's ridiculous. It's a powerful tool that happens to scale from the simplest of use cases to the complex, and for every use case, makes it possible to produce far richer sites than is possible completely by hand. And all of that without a database or need for a runtime language on a server, or client. A generated Hugo site has no need for PHP includes or other helpers. It can run on the simplest HTTP server; it's just static content. It's a tool, like an editor is a tool, to make an author more productive.

Hugo has seen success with corporate customers, including 1Password, Linode Digital.gov, KeyCDN, and Let’s Encrypt, to name just a few. Bjørn Erik Pedersen took over as the lead maintainer in 2015 and continues to lead Hugo’s thriving community.

Besides the official Vale style guides Buildkite, Linode, and Write The Docs have rules online that you can copy into your repo or use as inspiration for your own rules.

- https://github.com/linode/docs