Ask HN: How to Document Everything?

1 pointrobertlucas2 comments

I work in a small team of data scientists and next quarter I will need to document every minimal aspect of the work we do. I'm talking about processes, databases, scripts, functions and API endpoints. This documentation will be consumed both by those involved in development and by other stakeholders who are not tech-savvy.

What would HN use in this case?

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Firstly, seriously question the need to document every minimal aspect of the work you do.

Even if you have to describe everything, what’s wrong with a high-level description that gives links to your code repository for “every minimal aspect”? That at least has some chance of still being correct six months from now.

And that’s ignoring the remark “This documentation will be consumed by […] stakeholders who are not tech-savvy.”

Describing every minimal aspect of processes, databases, scripts, functions and API endpoints to them is madness.

Secondly, hire a technical writer.

My startup just launched a hosted wiki for exactly this purpose. It's zero setup and ready to run in minutes. Check it out and let me know if I can help! http://miki.mimix.io

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