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I am quiet impressed that there is even a niche market for people who want to host docs. It really just takes 15 minutes to setup a gulp/grunt script to build a

I am quiet impressed that there is even a niche market for people who want to host docs. It really just takes 15 minutes to setup a gulp/grunt script to build and push to cloudfront. After all, we need those scripts for local development anyways.

gkoberger 10y ago
There's a huge market for good developer experiences :) More and more people are becoming "developers" every day: computer-literate people who want to build something. It's easy to push something. It's a lot harder to build something good. Our goal is to get away from static docs, and show each developer exactly what they need.
- deckeraga 10y ago
  Documentation is great and all but I think the real huge market here is in merchandising that mascot of yours.
  - gkoberger 10y ago
    Email me (greg@readme.io), and I can send you some Owlbert swag :)
    - jtfairbank 10y ago
      Bro, send me some too. :D Email is in my profile.
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Same thoughts here. Since I need to document my APIs anyway it seems to make the most sense to add comments in code, run a build script and have it pushed up somewhere. Heck you could even check it in if you're so inclined and services like GitHub provide much of the community aspect that I need. Their stuff does look pretty though.
wwalser 10y ago
I'm a developer turned founder and I've considered using Readme.io. The ability to defer work in the exchange for time is king for me right now. In my experience, setting up another Google Cloud project (this could be cloudfront, heroku or w/e), selecting a static site generator, finding a theme and the inevitable customization that comes with that is significantly more than 15 minutes. Then of course once it's all done I'll have something that's sub-par from multiple perspectives: SEO, information architecture, no search built in, design doesn't quite match my brand. In the end the price point put me off enough for me to go in another direction. Yes, it would save time and that time would absolutely be worth $59 or $199 here and now. Maybe even that much every month for three months. At some point though I'm going to run the books and see that I've paid $2k for something I could have built myself in a day. Hopefully when that happens the company is at a point where that is a complete no-brainer "I'm glad I made that call", but there's no guarantee of that. Most companies fail and all that jazz. We're bootstrapped so the equation may be different if we raised money. I assume that's a significant part of their customer base.
- edoceo 10y ago
  I'm in the same spot. I use asciidoctor. I roughed in our API doc's and then had another dev from my community review. Quality is now good, style could use a little tweaking but at this point it seems like "just a little CSS"
jtfairbank 10y ago
My team uses ReadMe for non-technical documentation. We tried wikis and Google Drive before that and they all felt so... unoptimized. Searching was difficult, organizing was time consuming, and worst of all the documentation kept getting stale. While ReadMe is built for hosting code/API documentation, we've had no problems using it for just about everything else. And since the UI is great everyone from my operations lead to my executive assistant are able to jump in right away and contribute towards living documentation. Down the road, I plan to host our first customer support documentation on ReadMe. The both techies and non-techies can contribute towards keeping it up to date and a lot of the features that devs want with API documentation translate naturally to product support docs, such as the QA / Knowledge Base section.

gkoberger 10y ago

There's a huge market for good developer experiences :) More and more people are becoming "developers" every day: computer-literate people who want to build something. It's easy to push something. It's a lot harder to build something good. Our goal is to get away from static docs, and show each developer exactly what they need.

deckeraga 10y ago
Documentation is great and all but I think the real huge market here is in merchandising that mascot of yours.
- gkoberger 10y ago
  Email me (greg@readme.io), and I can send you some Owlbert swag :)
  - jtfairbank 10y ago
    Bro, send me some too. :D Email is in my profile.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago

Same thoughts here. Since I need to document my APIs anyway it seems to make the most sense to add comments in code, run a build script and have it pushed up somewhere. Heck you could even check it in if you're so inclined and services like GitHub provide much of the community aspect that I need. Their stuff does look pretty though.

wwalser 10y ago

I'm a developer turned founder and I've considered using Readme.io. The ability to defer work in the exchange for time is king for me right now. In my experience, setting up another Google Cloud project (this could be cloudfront, heroku or w/e), selecting a static site generator, finding a theme and the inevitable customization that comes with that is significantly more than 15 minutes. Then of course once it's all done I'll have something that's sub-par from multiple perspectives: SEO, information architecture, no search built in, design doesn't quite match my brand. In the end the price point put me off enough for me to go in another direction. Yes, it would save time and that time would absolutely be worth $59 or $199 here and now. Maybe even that much every month for three months. At some point though I'm going to run the books and see that I've paid $2k for something I could have built myself in a day. Hopefully when that happens the company is at a point where that is a complete no-brainer "I'm glad I made that call", but there's no guarantee of that. Most companies fail and all that jazz. We're bootstrapped so the equation may be different if we raised money. I assume that's a significant part of their customer base.

edoceo 10y ago
I'm in the same spot. I use asciidoctor. I roughed in our API doc's and then had another dev from my community review. Quality is now good, style could use a little tweaking but at this point it seems like "just a little CSS"

jtfairbank 10y ago

My team uses ReadMe for non-technical documentation. We tried wikis and Google Drive before that and they all felt so... unoptimized. Searching was difficult, organizing was time consuming, and worst of all the documentation kept getting stale. While ReadMe is built for hosting code/API documentation, we've had no problems using it for just about everything else. And since the UI is great everyone from my operations lead to my executive assistant are able to jump in right away and contribute towards living documentation. Down the road, I plan to host our first customer support documentation on ReadMe. The both techies and non-techies can contribute towards keeping it up to date and a lot of the features that devs want with API documentation translate naturally to product support docs, such as the QA / Knowledge Base section.