Rust February Meetup - A practical guide to making good documentation

We are very excited to have Beth Aitman give a practical guide to making good documentation in Rust (and other programming languages)!

Documentation is the major way that developers learn how to use a new technology(1) (with Stack Overflow a close second, obviously). And good docs make a huge difference to usability - all of us have struggled to use something because of poor documentation(2).

So we know that documentation is important. But writing it is kind of a pain. And so many developers don't really bother.

The goal of this talk is to make it much less painful for you to write documentation - and possibly even enjoyable. I'll give you a practical guide to writing effective documentation, and the conceptual background you need to understand the problem space.

We'll cover:

• what to write, and how to work out what you need to write
• tips for making your writing clear and easy-to-read
• making docs work for your audience (aka - when it is and isn't appropriate to talk about category theory)
• maintenance and testing

with plenty of examples of good and bad along the way.

(1) https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#developer-profile-ways-developers-learn-on-their-own, https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#developer-profile-ways-developers-teach-themselves
(2) https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016#work-challenges-at-work

Schedule:

• 18:45 Doors open
• 19:00 Talk by Beth
• After the talk, we have room for questions and discussion
• 21:00 Closing