Technical Writing Courses from Google

• diataxis-documentation-framework

  72 706 8.7 HTML

  A systematic approach to creating better documentation.

I am updatijg the user guide for an open source project, and found these short courses really helpful. It helps you write concisely and to keep the content simple. As well as provide some tools for structuring your docs.

The other resources I used were Diatáxis [1] and writing books I had on my bookshelf (Stephen King, Zinsser, etc)

[1] https://diataxis.fr/

• documentation-framework

  54 89 5.5 Python

  "The Grand Unified Theory of Documentation" (David Laing) - a popular and transformative documentation authoring framework

  

A while back i took both modules, they don’t take long to go through. Module 1 wasn’t any value to me, it felt far far too basic, i was really caught off guard by how basic it is. Module 2 was ok-ish. The lasting change these courses left in me was more appreciation for investing time and effort into illustrations.

I found other resources to be more impactful for me personally (e.g. jacobian / i’d rather be writing).

I liked this model https://documentation.divio.com/ - agreeing with people what purpose the docs they’re writing are for is a big chunk of the problem surface area. Having a model makes life easier. I’m not sure it has to be this exact model but this one seems good enough to me.

A counterproductive tendency I’ve observed frequently is when an SME is tasked with documenting their thing and they go off in ELI5 mode. So tutorial instead of how-to per the above model. Having that model helps keep those conversations short and productive.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• SQLite

  39 5,441 0.0 C

  Official Git mirror of the SQLite source tree

I wouldn't rely on Google to learn good practices for technical documentation (unless they want to release their complete internal technical documents on how their recommendation algorithms work, that is).

Instead, check out a reliable open source project like SQLITE, they have great documentation:

https://www.sqlite.org/arch.html

https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite

Suggest a related project