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People tend to find them through googling, but this is a general problem. I think that’s why there’s so many meet-up talks and conference talks about putting these things together. The boot camps have a really good curriculum about putting together Node stuff as well, because it is a hole and there’s not a central plac... |
**Eric Holscher:** Totally. And there’s a recommended way this all fits together, and there are documented ways of using other tools, but no, everything else is now going to not integrate well. So there’s another interesting example there, which is Pyramid in the Python world which is... Django is like, “We’re going to... |
Those are two very different worldviews about how to build software, but they change and inform how your documentation has to work, right? When you’re writing Django documentation, you can assume people are using the ORM, and the model structure, and the template language, and all of that stuff. Having all those higher... |
\[35:51\] In the Django world there’s a book called “Two Scoops of Django,” which is basically that as well, right? Even with this highly integrated ecosystem, there’s still a lot of different ways to do things, and that’s their best practice guide for how to put all this stuff together, and here’s the recommended way,... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I’m curious, in light of there being different approaches and methodologies, how much you can automate? Because I think maybe in the greater good sense of there just needs to be clear documentation on how to use a project, and maybe some people care a lot about different methodologies or not. Can you ... |
**Eric Holscher:** No, no. One of the values behind why we created Read the Docs was this intuition that every decision that you have to make along the path of doing something - it’s like a marketing funnel or a sales funnel, right? Each step you lose people, right? So you have to be like, “I’m gonna sit down and write... |
That was the view of Read the Docs. It's like a well-paved path towards documentation, right? You use this tool set, you host it here, you build it in this format, here’s the guide... And the part that’s always been missing is the actual what to write, and how to write it, and the actual act. We’re really good as progr... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I mean, I think you are still definitely talking about writing documentation as an act of writing how to use the software, rather than the documentation being embedded in the code and auto-generated that way. I have a fairly low opinion of that kind of documentation. I don’t know what your thou... |
**Eric Holscher:** Yeah, I agree. The Javadoc world, right, where it’s just like, “Here’s a alphabetically listed set of classes in your software.” That’s great for a very specific use case. If I already know your code works, and I just want to know the arguments to this function, and for some reason I’m not looking at... |
This is actually one of the things that I think Sphinx did really well, is it allows you to intersperse prose content with auto-generated content. You’ll see this in the Django documentation, you’ll see it in a bunch of other Python world things, where once you put the documentation in your repository - so you have a d... |
\[40:15\] So when the definition of the program or of the function changes, you don’t have to go back and update every piece of code that’s referencing that function. You can actually pull that in dynamically, and then you’re able to mix prose content with live source code content that is always up to date. I’ve seen a... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think humans, in general, are the theme of this podcast, probably. Let’s talk about the people that are part of it. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Pro-human! \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I’m really interested – when we had Jan Lehnardt on, we talked a lot about contributor funnels, and getting people involved in a project and having kind of a ladder. We did talk a bit about documentation and working on docs as being a great first step to get involved in those projects. I’m wond... |
**Eric Holscher:** Interesting. Well, I mean, I think so many times when I hear about documentation as a contribution, it’s the whole beginner-mind argument, where it’s like, “Hey, new person. You’re able to explain stuff to me, the expert, that I’ve already forgotten about and integrate it into the abstractions that e... |
I don’t know if Write the Docs is a hundred percent professionalizing it, it’s more just saying it’s valuable and it’s a skill that we all need to have. Yes, there’s people whose job it is to write, but every developer, their job is also to write. Regardless of if you’re doing open source work or something else, being ... |
I always see documentation framed as a non-code contribution, which is just really weird, like othering of anything but code, it’s like NoSQL - we’re defining what we’re doing in the negative, right? Non-code contributions are not somehow lesser than code contributions. They’re contributions to the project, and the fac... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[44:13\] There’s an ongoing theme here of the things that you value in your community are the things that people show up to do. That’s how you get contributors to actually value those kinds of skill sets. |
**Eric Holscher:** Right. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We’re starting to head into time for a break right now. We’ll return shortly with Eric Holscher and we’re going to get a little bit more deep on getting user feedback around the documentation. |
**Break:** \[44:39\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, we’re back with Eric Holscher, creator of Read the Docs and Write the Docs. So Eric, we talked about valuing documentation and valuing documentation skill sets. Are there some really specific things that you do, or that you’ve seen work for signaling that you care about that documentation an... |
**Eric Holscher:** Yeah, so I realize my background is really Python-influenced, but I think Django has done those the best of anywhere I’ve seen. They have multiple core contributors to the project who have come in through documentation contributions. One of the big things that they did is they basically require docum... |
So you’re signaling that test and documentation are just as important as written code when we’re thinking about deploying features, right? If you put this in the codebase and nobody knows it’s there, because it’s not documented, it means that it’s not a complete pull request, it’s not a complete feature. |
One of the really other interesting things that Django does as well is they have a policy of, if something is not documented, then it’s not supported. So if you start using features and they’re not in the documentation, that’s kind of a implicit gesture, or a implicit acknowledgement that it’s not documented. They are ... |
So it has more influence than just being words about code, which is the canonical repository of the project, and the thing that really matters, right? The documentation is viewed as its own product, that has its own value independently, as a broader open source thing. Having tags in your issue tracker for documentation... |
\[47:51\] Django has a design BDFL, they have a documentation lead, and a design lead. There’s code leads as well, but there’s actually management structure within the project that shows that they value these things. I think that’s really the thing - there’s so many implicit signals that come from caring about somethin... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, we did this in the Node .js project too, when we liberalized commit access. We started giving commitments for just solely documentation, and one of the really noticeable things is that retention was really high with a lot of those people. A lot of times when people show up to casually contribut... |
**Eric Holscher:** Yeah, it’s a cultural thing. You have to ease that in, right? Something else I’d be really, really curious about is the diversity of the people coming in through documentation contributions versus code my guess would be is higher. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. The first woman given a commitment in the project started with documentation. Actually, technically I think she started writing up the blog post for the evangelism working group, and then became a committer on the website, and then started working on documentation on the core and go... |
**Eric Holscher:** Yeah, I think that’s so important. If you don’t want the same group of people working on the thing, you have to find new ways to bring them in. I think documentation, the Write the Docs in general is basically gender neutral; it’s 50/50... Every year we’ve had 50/50 speakers. The entire industry, as ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. And also, I mean, giving them commitments and bringing them into leadership is really important as well, right? |
**Eric Holscher:** Totally. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, because you need those voices around. Especially, just generally, people who are thinking more about the end user experience of using it than having their head in the code implementation. They need to be enabled with the same kind of voting privileges and the direction of the project. |
**Eric Holscher:** Yeah. The emphatic love-bond that happens to me at the conference every year because technical writers are so much -- they’re real humans who communicate. They’re, I would say, way above average in the empathy scales, and not all developers necessarily are. It’s attracting a different type of skills ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I guess from that I’m curious how we incentivize documentation and other non-code contributions, and actually recruit that talent and reach out. Do you have to look outside the communities that are actively contributing right now? |
**Eric Holscher:** \[52:11\] Yeah, so that’s slightly tangential, but it's one of the things that I’m trying to do this year with the Write the Docs world, is to have a stable of speakers who are able to go to other events, because it felt – I’m worried that we’re getting a little echo chamber-y, where it’s like, “Hey ... |
I really want to put together a set of speakers who, it’s like, “Hey, we want a documentation talk at our conference. I think PyCon last year, I gave them - for not having any documentation talks... It's like, “Hey, you’re PyCon, how is this not happening?” I'm really trying to be able to influence the conferences, bec... |
I think one of the other big structural issues is that developers get value out of open source contributions that they do for free in hiring and career advancement, but I think other professions don’t have nearly the representative value, right? If I am a technical writer and I contribute to Django’s documentation or s... |
I think that’s one of the other things, is trying to figure out how we increase the value to non-programmers who are working too on open source projects, and that’s one I don’t know how to solve. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** The conference talks are a really good idea, actually. We’ve been doing that a little bit in the Node project around liberal contribution agreements and open governance, because we want that to persist out there. Essentially, what we’re really doing is just talking about, "Look at the level of succes... |
**Eric Holscher:** Right, and I think viewing these open source communities as really crazy incubators of ideas, and once we discover something and find something out, we really have to go and share it. I think – we haven’t talked about this much, but Nadia’s work in open source sustainability is the same way. It’s lik... |
I think that’s the same way. It’s like, “Hey, we built this really popular open source project, the docs were amazing, and here’s the process that we followed. You can do that too! Here’s how we got more contributors.” |
\[55:36\] There’s so many different things. PyCon does this with its diversity outreach, where it’s like, “Hey everybody, We have 40% female speakers at a tech conference, and five years ago it was 3%, and here’s how we did it. You can do it, too.” Spreading those messages... I think that so much of the value of the co... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Totally, and you’re the epitome of this. I think you’ve experimented with more things than any other project I know. Just for people who aren’t familiar, off the top of my head, you went through a start-up accelerator, which is actually how I first met you. You got a grant from Mozilla, you have enter... |
**Eric Holscher:** I don’t know if it’s a compliment to have tried everything, because that means obviously nothing worked. \[laughter\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Maybe, maybe... Which is also a great question and something that I’ve wondered about. I know that you and I have talked a little bit about the project management side of things like this, and Read the Docs is maybe more unusual in the sense of, you’re a service and a platform. I’m very curious to hea... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and it involves an enormous time commitment, right? And all of those benefits that you were talking about earlier, like employers wanting you and things like that - project managers don’t get recruited that way by looking at the open source projects. |
**Eric Holscher:** “Look at this issue that I wrote, it’s so good!” \[laughter\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, exactly. How do you incentivize that? Besides just giving people salaries. |
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