Eight typical Use Cases for creating or updating API documentation

Here are some of the common reasons why companies contact us about API documentation: You’ve been providing APIs to your largest customers, together with a lot of onboarding and technical support. You want to have more (smaller-sized) companies use the APIs, but you’re worried about the strain that will place on your Support team. You’re… Read more »

Is documentation a dirty word?

Daryl Colquhoun has written an article in tcWorld about the international standard ISO/IEC/IEEE 26512. He explained the standard is going to be revised and renamed: from “Systems and software engineering – Requirements for managers of user documentation” to “Systems and software engineering – Requirements for managers of information for users”. The reason for this, he states, is… Read more »

Lessons learnt from developing our API documentation course

We’ve written our new training course on documenting APIs, bar the model answers, and it’s now out for review. We’ve learnt a few lessons, and confirmed a few beliefs, whilst developing the course. We thought we’d share them below: Start with the absolute basics. It’s best to assume little or no knowledge of the subject, and start from… Read more »

Content as an API – Google’s engineering documentation

Google’s Riona MacNamara presented at the Write The Docs North America conference on “Documentation, Disrupted: How Two Technical Writers Changed Google Engineering Culture“. In the video of the presentation below, Riona explains how she worked with a small team of writers and engineers to build a documentation platform in six months that is becoming a part of the… Read more »

The over optimistic user

On Dara O’Brien’s Science Club (BBC 2) this week, neuroscientist Dr Tali Sharot explained “Optimism Bias”, suggesting that our brains may be hard-wired to look on the bright side. Here is her TED presentation on the Optimism Bias: Nearly everyone is optimistic they will never get divorced, and they are an above average driver, when… Read more »