Establish SPREAD documentation
Brief
¶February 2022
Establish the documentation function at SPREAD.
MkDocs Material ⋅ GraphQL ⋅ JavaScript ⋅ Python ⋅ Jinja ⋅ MarkDown ⋅ Vale ⋅ GitHub Actions ⋅ Docker
Challenge¶
There was no documentation, except for a few Confluence pages put together by engineers. The challenge was to create a documentation site, create the processes and pipelines to maintain it, and to write the content. The task was made more difficult by the fact that the product was constantly changing and I had engineering time to lean on.
Solution¶
In the first three months:
- Evaluated and selected options for the technical infrastructure.
- Socialized the newly established function in the company.
- Created the internal website.
- Created the initial build pipelines.
- Got to 50% product coverage.
- Wrote an initial style guide for general contributions
In the second quarter:
- Got product coverage to 90%.
- Moved to multi-repo setup, where engineering teams "owned" their content and maintained updates.
- Built the linting pipelines for general contributions.
- Document white-labelled products with internal customisations.
Within the first year:
- Publish the documentation site publicly.
- Publish the SPREAD glossary of terms.
- Create course content for new users.
Within the last year:
- Move to a mono-repo setup.
- Create more course content.
- Add AI enhancements to the build pipeline.
- Better monitoring of product changes.
- Re-start initiative for more people to write documentation.