documentation

Let's learn about Documentation via these 95 free blog posts. They are ordered by HackerNoon reader engagement data. Visit the /Learn or LearnRepo.com to find the most read blog posts about any technology.

Documentation is the process of creating written or visual materials that explain how a system, product, or service works. It matters for effective knowledge transfer, user adoption, troubleshooting, and maintaining consistency in development and operations.

1. Why Git Is A Great Documentation Management Tool

Sometimes not only documentation but also the process of working on it may be critical. For example, in the case of projects, the lion’s share of the work is related to preparing documentation, and the wrong process may lead to errors and even loss of information, and, consequently, loss of time and benefits. But even if this topic is not central to your work, the right process can still improve the quality of the document and save you time.

2. Documenting GraphQL APIs

The main reason for writing API documentation is to make your API understandable. For GraphQL there are many options. Both interactive and static documentation.

3. How I Use Notion to Manage My Relationship

A list of reasons why you should try documenting your relationship on Notion

4. Testing a Clean Architecture in a Frontend Application - Does It Make Sense?

Exploration of a real-life example of Clean Architecture in action on Frontend application. What could go wrong?

5. Autogenerate Your GraphQL Documentation With Magidoc

Learn how to autogenerate GraphQL documentation with Magidoc.

6. Maximizing the Power of Hypotheses in Product Development

How to work effectively with hypotheses, enabling them to navigate the complexities of product development

7. Common Mistakes in Engineer-Authored Docs and How to Fix Them

How to fix these issues using the tools of the “docs-as-code” approach.

8. Why NPM and Yarn f*cking suck

Opinion piece: What we can learn about documentation and logging

9. Part 1: Why Software Requirements In The Real World Are Hard

This is the first in a series of posts about my experiences developing software in healthcare with my team over the last few years. For most of that time we’ve worked in eye care, with doctors and patients in major centres in Europe, North America and Australia, as well as with global life science companies, on projects aimed at improving care delivery and patient outcomes.

10. Writing docs using Markdown and/or Vue component without build process

This is a new feature in docute@2.11 (beta version), you can get it by:

11. How to Publish a Book with GitBook CLI and GitHub Pages in 7 Minutes

Publishing a book or documentation online has never been easier than it is today.

12. Creating Beautiful Documentation Website For Your JavaScript Project

Nowadays, as a webdeveloper, you rarely build anything from scratch: your daily job mostly consists of integrating various Javascript libraries together. If you are building a web app you are most likely going to use some framework like React, Vue or Angular for your front-end. To transmit and manage the data you will be using Redux or GraphQL. For the backend, there will be Express and probably Loopback. Then you need to cover everything with tests, so Jest, Mocha or Jasmine must be present too. Finally, there will be UI frameworks like Bootstrap and maybe some charting tools. I have already counted at least 7 core libraries and all of these are in a single project! And what about underlying technologies like Javascript itself, Node.js and, probably, Typescript? Well, that’s a lot!

13. Auto-generation of Documentation for Event-driven Architecture

Auto-generation of documentation for Event-driven architecture

14. The Red Death of Flutter

Explanation of how Google's Flutter UI startup app was debugged and made to work again and connect with it's central Firebase Database through hours of work.

15. How To Generate API Blueprint using SwagGo

Generating API blueprint REST API Golang using SwagGo tools

16. Building a ChatGPT-Powered Markdown Documentation

Learn to build markdown documentation with Chatgpt and the OpenAI API

17. The Most Dangerous Person on Your Team is "Dave" (And He Just Quit)

Stop letting knowledge walk out the door. Use this system prompt to turn every commit into a well-documented masterpiece.

18. How We Built Our Software Documentation On Docusaurus

To cover our bases, we needed to improve and expand our documentation and this time, we wanted to make it scalable with Docusaurus.

19. The Code is No Longer the Source of Truth: Why Documentation is the New "Source Code"

In an agentic world, your documentation—specifically your structured API contracts—has replaced your implementation as the actual source code.

20. Exercises on Dependency Injection in ASP.NET: Introduction

In this post, we will do some exercises to go over the basics of DI (Dependency Injection) in ASP.NET.

21. Why Programmers Struggle To Write Good Documentation

For a programmer, proper documentation is a must-have. Its presence keeps track of the development process and later assists during the maintenance period. Successful documentation will make information accessible while providing limited users with entry points. It further helps new users learn quickly by simplifying the product and cut support costs as well.

22. How To Define The Good Documentation Skills

When comparing products, you want to decide on their usefulness. Yet, we often forget to evaluate the project's documentation

23. Open Source Series: Documentation

or answering the what and how questions

24. A Guide to Using Data Classes in Python

In "C" Language, you have structs. With the help of structs, we can define the return data type. You can do the same using classes in python.

25. How to Make Documentation Easier to Read

Let’s see how you can develop the skill of reading documentation! Most importantly, start by getting your answers from the documentation as you struggle.

26. Introduction to Great Expectations, an Open Source Data Science Tool

This is the first completed webinar of our “Great Expectations 101” series. The goal of this webinar is to show you what it takes to deploy and run Great Expectations successfully.

27. Software Development Knowledge Sharing Methods Are Broken: Here’s Why

Knowledge sharing for engineerings team and software developers is broken. Consuming knowledge at the right time is the key to success.

28. Tips For Documenting Your Code

Some will tell you that good code is self-documenting. In other words, if you write clear code then you won’t need comments.

29. Expand Your Crypto Knowledge With These 15 Must-Read Crypto Documents

Sprinkled with fairy dust and lathered in memes, the Crypto industry is built on a foundation of extremely informationally dense subject matters. Computer sc...

30. Use Comments to Unit Test Your Code [A How-To Guide]

At Supabase we love writing as little code as possible, so we decided to combine our unit tests with same JSDoc comments that power VSCode's IntelliSense.

31. 5 Software Documentation Tools That Make Managing Technical Documentation Easier

Software documentation is an important step in the process of software development. These are the 5 tools that make the cut when it comes to functionality.

32. Docs-as-Code: Managing Content is Easy When it’s Distributed

Few months back, I got a call from GitLab for a technical writer position. One of the question was about treating document as a code and what’s my view on that. The question was about treating document as part of a continuous integration and continuous deployment system. That question came at the time when I wasn’t treating doc as code and ironically, I now have a perspective.

33. Why is the Documentation of Tech Products So Hard to Use? (in the User’s Point of View)

Documenting tech products is a key part of making a project sustainable in the long term. Despite that, properly documenting them is incredibly difficult.

34. Asciidoc: When Markdown Just Isn't Cutting It

Markdown is amazing, but it has strong limitations. Asciidoc is the perfect tool to fill Markdown's gaps.

35. Building a Strong Portfolio in the Early Stages of a Startup: Tips and Strategies

A startup team may fail to deliver a product but should not fail to deliver a portfolio of value.

36. How to Describe Your Technical Issue to Get Quick and Effective Help

Documenting the issue before you ask for help will make everything so much more efficient.

37. I Choose Mermaid for Graph Creation and You Should Too 🚀

Mermaid is a lightweight diagramming and charting tool designed to tackle stale diagrams.

38. When Documentation Lies: Detecting Drift Between Code and Reality

Discovering the problem of outdated documentation and considering modern tools to works with it

39. 'One of the most pervasive failures (of FTX) is the absence of lasting records of decision-making'

FTX + SBF Chapter 11 Court Filing by John J. Ray III, Nov 17, 2022 is part of HackerNoon’s Legal PDF Series. Part 15/20: Information & Retention of Documents

40. Trust Signals in Open Source Projects

Polish the trust signals of your open source project to increase your user base and grow your community.

41. The Code Is the Documentation; a Paradox That Rings True

The first time I heard someone say: “the code is the documentation”, I thought it sounded completely wrong, like a lazy excuse for not producing documentation.

42. How to Name Things Properly

Perhaps it is not news to everyone that there are two hard things in Computer Science.

43. Re: "Nerds Don’t Respond to Marketing"

These are 13 --lightly edited-- response comments on how marketing to nerds requires a different approach.

44. Beware of Documentation Management. A Techlead's Hell Loop.

Software documentation can improve developer productivity a lot, but it has to be updated automatically and linked with the codebase which can be time consuming

45. The Painful Joy of Refusing Documentation

From AI hallucinations to debugging disasters, this essay explores the reasons why developers should stop fumbling around and start reading the docs.

46. A Practical Framework for Consistent Repository Documentation

Even solo engineers, who once had a free pass, must now contend with the inconsistency of AI-generated documentation.

47. Online Technical Documentation Is Almost Dead

We waste so much time and energy searching for answers because online technical resources are bloated, lack simple examples, rarely improved and have bad UI/UX.

48. How to Build a Smart Documentation - Based on OpenAI Embeddings (Chunking, Indexing, and Searching)

The main idea is to index documentation by splitting them into manageable chunks, generating embeddings with OpenAI, and performing a similarity search

49. Demystifying Tech Debt: An Overview of the 4 Types with Actionable Fixes

Learn how to manage technical debt in your codebase with this guide on the 4 types of tech debt, with examples. We'll look at how to fix each type of tech debt.

50. The Design Documentation No One Asks For (But Everyone Needs)

Specs tell you what to build. Decision records tell you why. How simple documentation prevents teams from rediscovering past mistakes and losing organizational

51. How to Initiate a Software Requirements Specification

How many times have you felt that it would have been better to contemplate the project requirements? How many times did you feel like including that “one” particular feature/function could have saved it from failure? Hold on to the thought right there! Do you think a System Requirements Specification could have played a pivotal role in success?

52. Top Tips and Tricks For When You're Working with PDF Files

Are you looking for PDF tips to ease your daily work? Read this article with all tips PDF users might need to achieve the results they want.

53. We Need to Talk About DX (Developer Experience)

I want all involved in development to think about other users. Not about those who use your application to solve their problems. But those who extend your app, run it in production and integrate with other systems. About developers, operations, SREs and many others who make your business running. Those behind the curtains. I want you to think about the Developers Experience (DX).

54. How to Write API Documentation the Right Way

API documentation is a critical part of any application's success.

55. Dealing with a Large Undocumented Codebase

I was recently asked to answer the somewhat vague question, “How do you interact with a large undocumented code base?”

56. Save Yourself the Headaches and Document Agreements the Right Way

Agreements are an essential part of software development. They lower development costs and make developers' lives easier. But there is a problem..

57. Strategies for Writing Effective Technical Documentation

Discover the core principles of effective technical writing and documentation, from using simple language to understanding the broader product strategy.

58. How I Over-engineered my Document Storage System With Paperless-ngx

Use paperless-ngx to build out the ultimate document storage system!

59. What Should You Do to Trust Event Data? Part 1 – Events Catalogue

Struggling with messy event data in event-based analytics? See practical insights on organizing event definition data to make them work.

60. How to Write Great Webhook Docs

Even if your webhook service is perfectly secure, reliable, and scalable, you need great documentation to provide a seamless user experience.

61. Digital Transformation in Banks – Role of Document Automation

Document Automation is the perfect start to digital transformation. It offers a low-risk investment with immediate returns for banks.

62. OpenAPI Specification v. 3+ Introduction

Mental Checklist

63. How to Lose Developers and Alienate Users: 5 Ways Not to Write Docs

I recently joined Jina AI, a startup focusing on neural search. One of the things that got me interested was their documentation — while not perfect, it’s straightforward, practical and easy-to-read. I wish that were just as true of every tech product out there.

64. Are your PDFs Actually Redacted? Double Check!

Follow these steps to prevent users from reading sensitive data you thought you had hidden.

65. Reading Documentation Shouldn't Be a Chore

Reading documentation is a skill that can be learned. Let's talk about how to do it effectively so that you retain the most knowledge.

66. From Static Docs to Living Knowledge Graphs: Fixing Engineering Documentation

Most engineering teams treat documentation as a manual chore, leading to “knowledge silos” and grueling onboarding cycles.

67. Meet the Dev Tool That Kills Stack Overflow Tabs for Good

How a smart documentation co-pilot, integrated right into my editor, helped me reclaim hours and stay in the coding flow.

68. How To Improve Your Software Documentation by Connecting Gitlab with Mkdocs

Producing documentation may be painful and need a lot of time to write and operate. In this story, i will share with you, my way of generating docs using the devops approach. To make life easier, we will explore the art of automation 😃.

69. My Takeaways After Attending Google Summer of Code 2019

This summer, my proposal got selected by Open Source Robotics Foundation for Google Summer of Code 2019. It was an awesome learning experience!

70. The Power of Whitepapers: Ensuring Quality Control in the Crypto Industry

One of the most pragmatic ways to implement quality control in crypto decision-making process is monitoring a project’s attention to detail in its whitepaper.

71. Why Does it Often Take Nearly a Month to Ship a Few Lines of Code?

Ever wondered why it takes nearly a month to ship out a few lines of code change to the star and reliable customers of your company? When the changes made are formally aligned with the product, marketing and application managers, what stops it from being shipped immediately? Why do managers quote timelines for a maintenance release that seems so "unrealistic" to you? These were the thoughts that were going through my mind during my first few months of writing production-quality code.

72. Our Journey to Building a Searchable Index with Algolia and NodeJS

Learn how we created a searchable index for our developer documentation using Algolia and NodeJS. Read about our challenges, implementation plan, and results!

73. How to Make Engineering Knowledge Searchable (A Complete Guide)

The only way to solve the Context Tax is to treat your work artifacts and your code, your meetings, and your tickets are as living documentation.

74. How DevOps Repair Logs Increase Your Happiness

How do you document infrastructure failures and outages?

75. Your Backend Deserves Better Than JSON Guesswork—Try This Setup

Learn how to document and validate your API schemas using Swagger and Zod, and generate TypeScript types for a robust and type-safe application.

76. An AI Crew for Automated Diagramming and Documentation

AI agents that automatically scan your live AWS infrastructure and generate complete documentation in 5-10 minutes.

77. How to Solve Engineering Problems Using Scientific Method

On every new software product, feature or project you develop you are bound to come across challenges that don’t have a clear answer at first.

78. Nurturing a Culture of Documentation

Documentation culture is about behavioral traits that technical writers practice every day based on set of beliefs and organizational values.

79. Remote Work: GitLab CTO Eric Johnson Shares 10 Tips to Make the Most of the New Normal

Eric Johnson, the CTO of GitLab (a FULLY REMOTE company with 1500 employees) shares his tips on how to manage a fully remote team async across timezones.

80. Devs - Documentation IS Important

Should you write software documentation? This article covers best practices of writing docs in a team or as a solo engineer.

81. Coding and Beyond: The Multifaceted Benefits of Writing for Developers

Unlock the power of written communication for developers. Learn how writing clarifies thoughts, aids collaboration, and bridges engineering-business gaps.

82. Setting Up Docs For An Open Source Project Doesn't Have To Be Hard

This article describes how we set up docs for our open source project Saasform. Docs are part of the source code, so they're browsable and easy to maintain. Mor

83. From 1,400 Pages to 200 Jira Tickets: Why I Had to Automate My Own Technical Writing Job?

From managing 1,400 pages of docs to analyzing 200 Jira tickets, here is how I automated my technical writing workflow using open-source tools and AI.

84. Readable Legal Documents Are No Longer a "Nice-to-Have"

By writing your company’s privacy policy in a clear and structured way, you influence how privacy policies are written and designed in huge organizations.

85. Writing Procedures Part 2: The Basics

Step-by-step guide to writing the procedure - sequence of actions to achieve the result. How to write the header, the body and the conclusion.

86. Code as Documentation and Assessment

Documenting IT networking lab procedures in code rather than word-processor documents enables more authentic, equitable and consistent assessment.

87. Create, Edit and Manage Screenshots with Snagit 2021

How does the new version of Snagit help you create, edit, and manage screenshots, and is it worth upgrading from what you currently use?

88. An Easy README Makeover In 3 Simple Steps

Oh yeah! We’re giving your README a makeover!

89. Zoom Webhook Documentation Review: What It Does Well and What It Could Improve

This post is a part of our "Documentation Review" series, where we collaborate with different companies to review, analyze and improve their docs.

90. Writing Procedures Part 1: Voice and Style

How to write a procedure for a user guide - recommendations on voice and style.

91. Your Design System Doesn't Work: Here's Why

After 2 years maintaining a solo design system at VALK, I found the real problems are organizational - not technical.

92. 6 Ways Digital Document Management Will Empower Your Business

Where does your company fit with today’s paperless trend? If you’re yet to harness a fully digital business, you’re not alone. Research proves that organizations still struggle to reduce paper consumption. In fact, throughout 2023 and 2024, the paper output in the USA is expected to grow, which shows that workplace digitization is proceeding pretty slow.

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Let's learn about Documentation via these 95 free blog posts. They are ordered by HackerNoon reader engagement data. Visit the /Learn or LearnRepo.com to find the most read blog posts about any technology.