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Both Adrian and Jacob were two of the co-founders along with Simon Willison, and Wilson Miner, who did the admin, he was the designer. They all really cared about that set of values, so I think the community just picked it up and ran with it from there. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So I saw when you first created Read the Docs, you got a hundred thousand views in that first month, and now obviously it’s grown to be so much more. I’m sure there people who are curious about how to grow a project - do you have a sense of how did you find those early users, and why did so many peopl... |
**Eric Holscher:** So I think one of the key things is that we noticed that Sphinx, the documentation generator, was really a de facto in the Python community, so we really were able to build on top of that. Read the Docs basically just hosts and builds Sphinx documentation automatically. Obviously, Sphinx at this poin... |
If you’re already building, writing documentation, putting it in your repo, you basically just have to go to Read the Docs and click the Import Repository button, and we automatically build your documentation. We pull it down, we build it. Having the standard tooling underneath really allowed that to go forward and get... |
\[08:08\] I think the other really big thing is that it was really well-designed from the start. Read the Docs was created by myself, but also Charles Leifer and Bobby Grace. Bobby was our designer, and he actually went on to become the design lead at Trello, and he’s done a bunch of other really amazing stuff. Having ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That’s a really good point. I’m curious, when you were between two projects, two opportunities, and you showed up in Kansas and you checked it out, and you were like, “I can live here”, did you know that Django... Was Django’s background in coming from a newspaper and their interest in documentation a... |
**Eric Holscher:** I definitely think it grew on me while I was there. Kind of the origin story and the founder myth, right? Like, “I was drawn to the newspaper by wanting to build more open access in the world”, but really, no. I was drawn by the technology. And then actually working in a newspaper and working with jo... |
And Lawrence, Kansas is this town of 100,000 people. Back in 2008 when I went there, it was like, they had a website that still trumped, or trumps any newspaper website in any major metropolitan area. They had a really amazing local events calendar, they had so much, so much amazing technology. I was really – the big r... |
My story with documentation it’s very similar. When I started Read the Docs, it was scratching my own itch - I was a programmer, I just wanted to solve a problem. But then, especially when we started creating the conference and got into that, I really started to appreciate the importance and the value of it, once I rea... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[11:52\] You mentioned really quickly Write the Docs, your conference. Could you tell us a little bit more about how that started, the early successes and what it’s turned into now? |
**Eric Holscher:** Sure. It was back in 2012 and I was at a local café with a few people. In Portland we do these weekly coder meet-ups that are more social than getting anything done, and I was talking with Troy Howard, who has done a few other conferences like Node PDX, JSConf in China, and a couple other things. I w... |
We built the website, and I went up and wrote a blog post and put it on Twitter, and then it hit the front page of Hacker News. We were envisioning this little 75-person Portland regional event, maybe from Seattle and San Francisco, but just about 75 people in an office on a Saturday or Sunday, or something; a free ven... |
The first year was a 200-person conference here in Portland, and we had people from all over the country, and a few from out of the country, who were in the States for other reasons, but swung by. That was four years ago, and then this past couple of weeks ago actually in Ma, we had our fourth year, which was 400 peopl... |
We now have a European version in Prague, it’s going to be about 250 this year. It’s really starting to build this more global community of people that care about documentation. It’s something we really wanted to think more about once it really started to expand beyond Read the Docs users. It’s expanding to just beyond... |
We had a bunch of people come first year who were tech writers, and it’s this whole community that I didn’t even know existed. From there, we're trying to keep it very cross-disciplinary, where there’s a lot of support-type people, that do support work. Now they have their own other set of conferences, very similar, li... |
\[15:51\] That’s really where I see the conference today - it’s the documentation arm of the software world, or the constituency of people who care about documentation. Some of that’s tech writers, some of that’s developers, some of that’s support staff. A lot of people this year actually were devrel, evangelism-type p... |
That’s really where we are now, just trying to build best practices, build out learning materials in an open source fashion, that’s free and on GitHub, that’s like, “Hey, you want to write documentation? That’s great! Here’s how to do it. Here’s where you could start. Here’s some good resources”, and really trying to h... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Take us back a little bit to the beginning, back in your day when you first got involved. What was the state of documentation like? What was it? How was it being culturally perceived? And then over the years, especially as you’ve been doing Write the Docs events, how has that been changing culturally? |
**Eric Holscher:** So much of it is really hard to know because, because I'm sure I have my own little filter bubble. "My Twitter feed cares a lot about documentation..." I do sense a general trend in the software industry of caring more about documentation. Probably a small part of that is the work that we’ve done wit... |
To answer the question, I think back in 2008, 2010, testing was undergoing this transformation. Maybe in 2005 testing was this thing that software - it might have, it might not, some people thought it was important, there was a lot of people talking about it, but it wasn’t this accepted best practice, and I think in 20... |
I think documentation is undergoing a similar transformation, but just a few years later. I think you’re starting to see every open source project that gets announced will have documentation. If they actually want people to use it, it’ll have a reasonable set of documentation, whereas 2008, 2010 you'd have so many proj... |
\[19:59\] I think that’s really my metric that I really think about, it's how many people look at documentation as one of the first one or two things to look at on a project to decide if they’ll use it or not. I think that's true for a number of people in the Python community - that has always been high, but I think al... |
But we weren’t actually on the testing train as early, right? When I look back in history I see Ruby as really, really testing-focused and Python is really doc-focused, and now we’re both starting to merge into the other and get excited about... They’re both important parts of software development. |
So I see more and more projects that care about documentation, of people talking about it, people actually writing it and caring about writing it. That’s really the metric, right? The number of projects with documentation that people are actually focusing on and putting time towards, and obviously that’s incredibly har... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Well, we’re hitting time for our first break. We really enjoyed hearing all of your background experiences. When we come back from the break, we’ll dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of documentation. |
**Break:** \[21:38\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** We’re back from the break with Eric Holscher, who is the creator of Read the Docs. We’re just going to dive into the nuts and bolts of documentation. I thought we’d start just by making the case for anyone who might be listening to this and isn’t convinced that documentation is important, why does doc... |
**Eric Holscher:** Totally. Almost every talk that I give, I do a little five minutes at the beginning, because I think giving people the words - even if they’re already convinced, but using the words to convince others... I think it’s really important to have these arguments actually thought out. One of my favorite on... |
I think about documentation as serializing your mental state into words, so that it can be loaded back in faster than reading source code. Reading source code is one way to put a program into your brain, but actually writing down your design decisions and code comments and doc strings allows you to basically reload wha... |
\[23:53\] In terms of project maintainers, I think documentation is the best marketing, right? I know a lot of developers who hear marketing shudder... It’s like one of those words that “Thou shall not say", but really, if you want people to use your software, they have to know what it does, they have to know how to in... |
That’s true for closed source code, as well as open source, especially if you’re in a larger company, right? You have six different divisions that are all basically writing the same software, and they’re not sharing anything, and you actually want to have other people use the software that you write, which is like one ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Nobody uses that project. |
**Eric Holscher:** I would fire the developer who used that project. I don’t want to work with the guy that uses that project, or the gal. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** In fact, I’ve actually not put readme's on things as a sign to say please don’t use this yet. I’ll put readme on it when I want people to use it. |
**Eric Holscher:** That’s great. I think one of my favorite appeals to everyone in software is that writing words is 80% of the job of software development. You have emails, you have commit messages, you have GitHub issues, you have chat, you have Slack, you have IRC, you have Twitter, you have your marketing content, ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That’s a great line. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think there’s something similar here with the test-driven development, which is that you write a test for something so you could see how people use it. But then we’ve created so many of these test frameworks that you get so obfuscated from how people actually use it, whereas documentation - you rea... |
**Eric Holscher:** Right, and rethink without re-implementing. I get to re-architect the code without throwing away a bunch of work, right? That’s the beauty of test-driven development and the kind of readme-driven and documentation-driven development, it is really that thinking through the API that’s going to be publi... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[28:27\] I’m curious for people who are writing documentation for different types of projects, do you find that the needs for documentation are different for different types of projects, different communities, if it’s a big project or a small project? At what point should they be making that investme... |
**Eric Holscher:** That’s a lot of questions. \[laughs\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Sorry. Basic question is, is documentation different for different types of projects? |
**Eric Holscher:** Totally, totally. One of the themes in the writing world, in the conferences, is know your audience, right? That’s one of the things that’s always true about software and writing in general is who’s going to use it, right? The type of documentation that you write for a kernel module in C or C++is goi... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Great. |
**Eric Holscher:** I agree that as projects grow, there are needs for documentation change, right? I know in the Node world particularly, there’s this small module philosophy (Unix philosophy) “Do one thing and do it well.” There are cultures that basically just write readme, right? As I’ve heard it expressed, and Mike... |
This is actually a trap that I think a lot of people fall into with documentation, is that they start off and they’re like, “All right, we just need three or four pages, right? We need a support page, install page, couple other pages”, right? And it really doesn’t make sense to invest in a lot of documentation tooling ... |
When you just have a few pages on a website, Markdown is a wonderful tool and it works really well for that, but once you actually start to be documenting really large API references and a bunch of other inner-referenced code, that’s when something like AsciiDoc or reStructuredText or these more powerful languages comb... |
\[32:11\] I guess the other facet of that is really building out documentation for specific audiences, like writing API documentation for people who are using it as a library, while also having the tutorials for people who are just coming in and want to figure out which project’s right for them and get started, and the... |
A lot of these are actually from Jacob KaplanMoss. He has this almost seminal work on documentation called "Writing Great Documentation" on his blog, and I think at this point it’s eight years old, but is still one of the de facto references, which shows you how fast documentation culture is moving in programming. A lo... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, definitely. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah. I think you hit on something really interesting there, which is that there are different types of learners, and they’re going to require different resources in order to learn. When you were mentioning the Node.js community – yes, there is this culture about, “Do one thing and do it well,”... |
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