We don't show our docs enough love.
And that's a shame. The docs are as much a product as the API is. According to SmartBear's State of API Report 2020, 63% of developers consider "accurate and detailed documentation" as the top factor for choosing an API. That's all the way up from 25% in 2016.
We're crazy about writing clean code and shipping awesome features, but now it's time to show some love to our docs and make the lives of our fellow developers easier.
We can fix this.
Yes, there's so much that goes into documentation. Designing, writing, organising, publishing, enabling collaboration, keeping it up to date. But there are ways to make it work.
In this course, I'll explain the key concepts you need to know, together with real-world examples. I'll show you how to leverage your dev skills to design documentation workflows. And we'll go ahead to practice it.
Course content
- Content and Presentation (8:47)
- Reference and Conceptual Documentation (7:45)
- Setting Expectations (13:57)
- Real-world Patterns 1: Developer Home (5:45)
- Real-world Patterns 2: Reference Docs (12:07)
- Real-world Patterns 3: Dynamism and Examples (7:42)
- Real-world Patterns 4: Interactivity and Machine-readable documentation (10:07)
- Real-world Patterns 5: Timestamps and more (8:28)
- Summary
- Setting up (11:54)
- Documenting at the API Level (19:59)
- Documenting at the Endpoint Level (20:38)
- [Case Study 2/Weblo] Setting Up (11:37)
- [Case Study 2/Weblo] Writing the Documentation (21:19)
- [Case Study 3/Pantheon] Setting Up (23:29)
- [Case Study 3/Pantheon] Writing the Reference Documentation (18:05)
- [Case Study 3/Pantheon] Writing the Conceptual Documentation (16:51)
- [Case Study 3/Pantheon] Testing the Documentation (17:11)
- Wrapping Up😅 (8:07)