Avoiding the docs slide into staleness takes some proactive effort. But a lot of that can be automated these days.

I talk about some suggestions in a blog post here: https://djw.fyi/portfolio/preventing-drift/

#WriteTheDocs #docs #TechnicalWriting #DocOps #LLMOps

"At my current job, I've built a CLI tool that has over 20 different commands that help my team with doc ops and content quality. We frequently add, remove, and refine commands as our approach to documentation matures and our tooling changes. Our CLI was built to work with our docs repo, and has tools that let us do things like:

- Validate all our arbitrary frontmatter
- Generate card components for individual pages from frontmatter
- Regenerate our custom Vale Views
- Run a bunch of git commands for reporting purposes
- Build a changelog for our Fern Definition
- Summarize changes on a branch compared to main (to help draft release notes)
- Extract and format a list of all our public endpoints from our Fern Definition
- Generate a list of slugs and their associated filenames
- Regenerate all D2 diagrams
- Preflight checks that run all of our doc quality checks
- So much more

Some of our commands are just thin wrappers for commands for other tools we use (like Fern, Vale, git, and Linkinator). Some of our commands are just wrappers for bundles of our homegrown scripts. There aren't any hard rules for building your own internal CLI tooling. I just happened to bundle it all up into a CLI tool because that's what made sense for my team. Do what makes sense for your team."

https://docsgoblin.com/blog/25-12-03-building-tooling.html

#TechnicalWriting #DocsAsCode #Automation #SoftwareDocumentation #CLI #DocOps #Git #Vale

I've lately become very interested in an open hardware data modeling project that could be a game changer, and I think anyone interested in #OpenHardware and #DocOps should take note. #OSHW

https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/20x/presentations/fire-smoke-and-open-source-hardware

https://github.com/Mach30

Fantastic talk on crossover from DevOps and documentation by @lornajane at #writethedocs

I’m still out here trying to make #DocOps a thing

I love how #Ops has become a thing across tech: #DevOps, #SecOps, #DocOps, etc.

Saw a new one today that makes even more sense to me: #HugOps

I know, right?

So go do your thing, #Internet. Make this happen. #Hugs everyday, not just #Caturday #WeCanChangeTheWorld

#CatsOfMastodon #MastoCats #KittehSnuggles #Tortiseshell #GingerCat #FreeHugs

I published a version of my "so-short-even-a-developer-can-read-it" technical writing style guide https://lornajane.net/posts/2024/short-tech-writing-style-guide-for-developers

The goal is to give guidance that helps a technical contributor to be successful without needing to be an expert in writing as well. There are many things that can be picked up with some good #DocOps tooling or a quick review from someone who does deal with docs every day. So stick to the basics, and give people advice they can use!