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It occurs to me that I didn't really answer the question as it was being asked, I blame it being after midnight when I wrote that (and being too excited about s
by azdle 11y ago
It occurs to me that I didn't really answer the question as it was being asked, I blame it being after midnight when I wrote that (and being too excited about showing off my search thing).
We do have the technical part down pretty well, but actually managing the documentation is one area that we're still lacking in. For the longest time our docs consisted mostly of just an API reference [1] and to be honest that did really cover about 90% of the needs of our customers, but that last 10% involved quite a bit of hands-on coaching with most of our customers to get them to understand the system as a whole before they could go off on their own and understand which API calls they'd need to make to do the thing they wanted to do.
One of the biggest helps has been keeping everything in github. Having all the docs be markdown is great because it's just text so everyone can use the tools they want to, we're not locked into some web wysiyg editor. And since it's all in git it's trivial for anyone in the company to open an issue about something incorrect or even submit a PR for anyone that's more technical. Plus when someone does have a question that I and the other editors don't know the answer to we can just git blame it to find out who put the piece in question there and ask them to clarify what they meant.
Now that we've been able to grow so much we're getting more able to focus on polishing up the docs, which is actually officially my job now that I've moved from the support team into the (new) technical marketing team. We've started making more information that describes how the system works as a whole [2] so that we can have completely hands-off customers who just pay us money without us having to personally walk them through the system.
Of course there are other fun things that I intend to do with it like interactive demo API requests and auto generating a table of contents, but those are really just 'wizz-bang' features that are fun and helpful but are definitely not required.
These are some of the other sites that I've taken (or am planning to take) inspiration from: [3] [4] [5]
[1] http://docs.exosite.com/rpc/ http://docs.exosite.com/rpc/
[2] http://docs.exosite.com/oneplatform/ http://docs.exosite.com/oneplatform/
[3] http://developer.wordnik.com/docs http://developer.wordnik.com/docs
[4] https://www.twilio.com/docs/ https://www.twilio.com/docs/
[5] https://docs.particle.io/ https://docs.particle.io/