Ask HN: How Do You Write Documentation
31 by OliverGilan | 16 comments on Hacker News.
Hello HN, I'm a new grad fresh out of college who just started my first gig as a software engineer. My team currently has very few docs for their codebases and it lead to quite a difficult and long onboarding process. Good documentation has always been an incredible help for me while in school and working on side projects but I've never really learned or put in the effort to WRITE good documentation myself. I think my team could really use a revamp in their documentation and I would love to be the one to provide that but I don't even consciously know what separates good docs from bad docs. Are there specific "design principles" for writing documentation? For example, what sections should there be, how should the info be structured, etc. When it comes to diagrams, UML seems like the framework to learn but are there others? Btw, these would be internal and not public facing. Thanks!