We chat with Jared Bhatti and Zachary Sarah Corleissen, two technical writers with deep experience at major tech companies and open source projects, about their approach to documentation and the new book they helped co-author, Doc For Devs. We go deep on the best ways to annotate a codebase for future generations and how to localize explainer content so that it works for teams across multiple regions and languages.
If you want to dive deeper, Jared and Zach wrote a blog post for us you can find here.
Episode notes:
Docs for Devs: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing can be found here.
Jared worked as a technical writer at Google for more than 14 years and recently transitioned to Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out under the Alphabet umbrella. You can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Zachary has been a technical writer at GitHub and the Linux Foundation, and now works as a staff technical writer at Stripe. You can find all her online accounts at her website.
Interested in exploring approaches for collaboration and knowledge management on engineering teams? Why not try a tool developers already turn to regularly? Check out Stack Overflow for Teams, used by Microsoft, Bloomberg, and many others.
Tired of security bottlenecks? Today’s episode is sponsored by Snyk, a developer security platform that automatically scans your code, dependencies, containers, and cloud configs — finding and fixing vulnerabilities in real time, from the tools and workflows you already use. Create your free account at snyk.co/stackoverflow.