Documentation Best Practices
Making Good Tutorial Content
- Go through the tutorial in full at least once before publishing.
- If possible, do this process with at least one person and incorporate their issues and questions in the tutorial.
- If giving a template shell script, try to avoid using template specifiers that will wreak havoc when copy pasted, as things will inevitably be copy pasted. As an example, We advise against something like
cat <file name>
which may trigger indirection, simply usecat FILE-NAME
orcat FILE_NAME
.
Keeping Documentation up to Date
In general you will encounter cases where documentation is inadequate / out of date when people start complaining or asking questions. It can be very easy to issue a temporary fix or give a verbal explanation in this case but it's always best to incorporate such issues in the docs.
- Any time you find that documentation is out of date, make an issue in the ft_docs repo so somebody else can fix it or make a pull request to fix it yourself.
- Any time you give an explanation of infrastructure, you should ensure that that piece of infrastructure exists somewhere in the docs and its explanation is up to date.