The Secrets of Technical Writing by Matthew Johnston.
From the post:
The process of writing code, building apps, or developing websites is always evolving, with improvements in coding tools and practices constantly arriving. But one aspect hasn’t really been brought along for the journey, passed-by in the democratisation of learning that the internet has brought about, and that’s the idea of writing about code.
Technical writing is one of the darkest of dark arts in the domain of code development: you won’t find too many people talking about it, you won’t find too many great examples of it, and even hugely successful tech companies have no idea how to handle it.
So, in an effort to change that, I’m going to share with you what I’ve learnt about technical writing from building Facebook’s Platform docs, providing documentation assistance to their Open Source projects, and creating a large, multi-part tutorial for Facebook’s F8 conference in 2016. When I talk about the struggles of writing docs, I’ve seen it happen at the biggest and best of tech companies, and I’ve experienced how difficult it can be to get it right.
These tips aren’t perfect, they aren’t applicable to everything, and I’m not at an expert-level of technical writing, but I think it’s important to share thoughts on this, and help bring technical writing up to par with the rest of code development.
Note that this is from the perspective of writing technical docs, it can just as easily apply to shorter tutorials, blog posts, presentations, or talks.
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The best tip of the lot: start early! Don’t wait until just before launch to hack some documentation together.
If you don’t have the cycles, I know someone, who might. 😉