Architecture
Monolith
Monolith
Architecture
- You build them from scrach, otherwise you're doing it wrong,
- Designed for cloud,
- In most cases they talk with each other through REST API over HTTP protocol.
Developer's challanges become yours
- Services are independent, but documentented in one portal,
- There are many of them, more are comming, teams are extending,
- Continuously released and deployed.
become a technical writer for microservices. Now
Microservices main principle
"you build it you run it"
You want to become a TW for microservices because:
- Ready playground and production environment,
- You really become "technical" writer, you can quickly learn things,
- Continuously release = continuous feedback = continuous improvement.
Now imagine how your current organization would handle what I just said
- Technical: Make documentation creation flow an integral part of the whole service development cycle
- Organizational: Remove/Cancel/Destroy current Documentation team/department organization
Organizational change
- Technical writers real dev teams members with the same manager as other team members,
- Community of practice that works together on standards and best practices.
- New scrum team with some cool name (Q?) that consists of documentation arch, trainers, language reviewers.
- New scrum team with some cool name (Wookiees?) that consists of documentation arch, developers and works on documentation solution.
Psyhological change
- "don’t say Bugs but Defects"
- "don’t say What went wrong but What we can do better"
Devs treat writers as a team member
No more excuses
- "We need documentation? Talk to docu team, they should give us TW that will do it for us"
- "Documentation? We failed cause Docu team moved one of our TWs to another project"
- "New feature? Docu team has to decide what to do with it"
Now they say
- "We can’t release it without documentation. We need to document and talk to Q team to get a language review"
- "We have something new that doesn’t fit the current structure. We need to talk to CoP and ask what to do, and then we have to do it"
- "I don't like how it is formatted in the UI. We need to talk to Wookiees to improve it"
Technical change in theory
- Whole docu with the service source code
- Documentation and release notes kept together
- Central registry of each documentation topic
- Portal template based on static site generator
- Continuous integration plans
Technical change in action
Run in the terminal:
docker run -it --rm --name api-doc-sample -p 9778:9778 derberg/dsa-quickstart /bin/bash
npm run start
open http://localhost:9778/ in a browser
Visit https://github.com/yaas/docpad-skeleton-apidocs for more details.