Need Examples? Write Your Own!

Description

End users, sales engineers, and developers are united in their criticism of your documentation:

It doesn't have enough examples!

What can you do? Even if you have the time to provide examples, you might feel like you're not qualified to write them. Your audience asks for examples, but they don't give you any specifics. Your engineers provide examples, but your customers can't understand them.

In this talk, I'll prove that your technical writing skills make you well-suited to writing effective examples. I have more than 20 years' experience writing API examples for companies such as Oracle, Google, and Splunk, and I've learned that good examples depend more on writing skills than coding skills. Based on this knowledge, I'll show you how to:

  • Determine which examples you'll need
  • Provide examples with the right amount of complexity
  • Work with SMEs to develop examples
  • Create style guides for writing examples
  • Store examples as live code and refer to them in documentation
  • Conference: Write the Docs Prague
  • Year: 2020

About the speaker

Joe Malin