A couple years ago, the docs team at GitHub wasn’t in a great position. We’d outgrown our tooling, both in terms of the number of writers using it and the complexity we’d introduced with new products. We use GitHub for everything and have a “docs as code” philosophy.
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Writing docs is complex. You need tooling that can handle single-sourcing, versioning, variables, reusables, localization, the ability to pull in automated content generated elsewhere, etc. And all of this content needs to make it onto a site that has a great info experience.
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Docs teams are often left to do all of this themselves. People think that the job of a tech writer is non-technical, but that’s not true. Tech writers are often engineering their own tooling solutions and sites with minimal or no help from anywhere in the organization.
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Back in late 2018,
@zeke reached out to me - from a different team! - and mentioned that he wanted to help us with localization. It was the first time in my entire career that an engineer had ASKED to help. That conversation changed the entire docs experience at GitHub.Prikaži ovu nit -
Zeke, along with Sarah Schneider, a writer-turned-engineer, redid all our back-end tooling. Their work made the writer's work easier, enabled us to internationalize http://help.github.com , set the foundation for new initiatives, and gave us the first iteration of a new design.
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More than anything though, having dedicated engineers on docs meant that for the first time ever, writers had engineers who intimately understood the needs of our team and spent their time thoughtfully working to make things better internally for writers and externally for users.
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Their work inspired trust on our team. For the first time in my career, I knew there were engineers who deeply cared about this work. It’s such a simple thing - knowing that you have support, that you’re not alone - but it changes everything.
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Without dedicated engineering, without Zeke and Sarah, we wouldn’t be where we are today. We’re set up for success. We feel confident. We know that our work is worthy of receiving help from other people. They gave our team hope.
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If you're leading a docs team, push for dedicated engineering help. If you're an engineer or PM and you see that a docs team doesn't have dedicated help, push to get them that help. The work is complex and important.
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You can't have big dreams if you have no way to execute on them. I've got big dreams for docs at GitHub. And Zeke and Sarah have shown me that they're possible. It's been an incredible lesson to learn.
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