Docs for Developers: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing

Learn the craft of documentation for each step in the software development lifecycle, from understanding your users’ needs to publishing, measuring, and maintaining useful developer documentation.

Well-documented projects save time for both developers on the project and users of the software. Projects without adequate documentation suffer from poor developer productivity, project scalability, user adoption, and accessibility. In short: bad documentation kills projects. This new edition has been fully updated and edited taking into account the needs for developers and tech writers today, with new content relating to AI, automation and LLMs.

Docs for Developers demystifies the process of creating great developer documentation, following a team of software developers as they work to launch a new product. At each step along the way, you learn through examples, templates, and principles how to create, measure, and maintain documentation―tools you can adapt to the needs of your own organization.

You Will Learn to: 

• Create friction logs and perform user research to understand your users’ frustrations
• Research, draft, and write different kinds of documentation, including READMEs, API documentation, tutorials, conceptual content, and release notes
• Publish and maintain documentation alongside regular code releases
• Measure the success of the content you create through analytics and user feedback
• Organize larger sets of documentation to help users find the right information at the right time
• Understand where (and where not) to integrate AI into your documentation workflow

This Book Is For 

Developers who need to create documentation alongside code, or for technical writers, product managers, community managers, developer advocates, and other technical roles who create and contribute to documentation.

‘This book is like Strunk & White for writing tech docs’

―Tom Johnson, Senior Technical Writer, Google

‘As AI reshapes how people find and consume information, understanding your users and writing docs that serve them is critical – and Docs for Developers makes that entire process accessible to any team.’

―Tal Gluck, Developer Advocate, GitBook and co-author, State of Docs report

Jared Bhatti is Lead Technical Writer for Waymo engineering. Before that, he was the co-founder of Google’s Cloud documentation team. He’s worked on a variety of projects at Google, including Kubernetes, App Engine, Adsense, Google’s data centers, and Google’s environmental sustainability efforts. He loves teaching writing and mentors several junior writers in the industry.

 Sarah Corleissen has worked as a Senior Technical Writer in a variety of organizations focused on cloud native and open source work, including Isovalent, the Linux Foundation, Stripe, and Github. Sarah served as co-chair for Kubernetes documentation from 2017 until 2021. She enjoys speaking at conferences and loves to mentor writers and speakers of all abilities and backgrounds. 

 Jen Lambourne leads the technical writing and knowledge management discipline at Monzo Bank. Before her foray into fintech, she led a community of documentarians across the UK government as Head of Technical Writing at the Government Digital Service (GDS). Having moved from government to finance, she recognizes she’s drawn to creating inclusive and user-centred content in traditionally unfriendly industries. She likes using developer tools to manage docs, demystifying the writing process for engineers, mentoring junior writers, and presenting her adventures in documentation at conferences.

David Nunez is the Co-Founder of Falconer, an AI startup that for creating, maintaining, and finding institutional knowledge. Before that, he led the technical writing organization at Stripe, where he founded the internal documentation team and wrote for Increment magazine. He also founded and led the technical writing organization at Uber and held a documentation leadership role at Salesforce.

Heidi Waterhouse spent a couple decades at Microsoft, Dell Software, and many, many startups learning to communicate with and for developers. She’s constantly reassured to find that technical communication is universal across all roles. She is also the co-author of Progressive Delivery: Build the Right Thing for the Right People at the Right Time.