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Open Source & Feelings Seattle October 3, 2015 Documentation as Empathy Eric Holscher (@ericholscher)

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7 years ago

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I was writing Perl for the Military

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No • Documentation • Version Control • Tests

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It all started with a PDF

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Serendipity • Feb 20: http://ericholscher.com/blog/ 2008/feb/20/job-hunt/ • Feb 21: https://jacobian.org/writing/ sailing-on/

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Documentation Culture

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People don’t use projects that don’t have docs

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I start writing docs • Django Kong • Django Test Utils • Django Reusable App Docs

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Jacob was a huge influence • 2009: https://jacobian.org/writing/great- documentation/ • 2011: http://pyvideo.org/video/403/ pycon-2011--writing-great-documentation

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Created Read the Docs to reduce friction to writing & publishing docs

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From Tool to Understanding

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Read the Docs was started in 2010

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Started Write the Docs in 2013

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Learned about a whole community of writers

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Documentation is more than a tool

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Technical writers know what makes so ware understandable

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More communities are valuing documentation

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Documentation as guilt

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Coding & Testing have objective results

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Documentation is a “so skill”

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All programmers feel guilt about this

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Leads to putting off writing docs

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We need to lower the barriers in our industry to writing documentation

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Why it matters

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Empathy

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You don’t want a community full of people who don’t read documentation

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Documentation is Outreach

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My path is the path of many others

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“I can’t say I’m self taught. I’ve been taught by the people who wrote the documentation” — @soulshake

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Thanks writethedocs.org readthedocs.org