DevRelCon Earth 2020:

Building Developer Documentation with a Fully Remote Team and Community

Join us for our talk and Q&A at DevRelCon Earth 2020, where we show you the steps and iterations in our journey of building the platformOS developer portal, and talk about the approaches, processes, and tools we used from the discovery phase to the current UKTC Award-winning developer portal. 

Date: July 9, 2020

Time: 07:10 PST / 15:10 GMT /  23:10 JST 

Process 

Information Architecture

• How we started
• How we got to know our audience
• How we figured out what content we need
• How we outlined a sitemap for our documentation site

Approaches discussed: Design Thinking, personas, remote UX workshops, card sorting, remote usability testing

Tools discussed: content inventory, sitemap, online research tools, Mural, Miro, Figma, lookback, playbookUX, UsabilityHub, OptimalWorkshop, SurveyMonkey, HotJar

Layouts, navigation, and design

• How we created the layouts and navigation for the site
• How we created and iteratively updated the design based on community input

Approaches discussed: iterative design, branding

Tools discussed: wireframes, Sketch, Figma

Content production

• How content production started
• How we developed and adjusted our editorial workflow
• How we ensure continuous production of updates and new content

Approaches discussed: Content First, open source, community contributions, editorial workflow for distributed communities

Tools discussed: style guide, templates, Markdown, GitHub

Implementation

• Technologies we used
• How we use GitHub for our docs as code workflow

Approaches discussed: docs as code, auto-generated documentation, automated tests, extreme performance

Tools discussed: GitHub, performance tests

Community

• How we collaborate with our remote and distributed community
• Channels we use to communicate
• How we help and encourage contribution to our documentation

Approaches discussed: community-driven documentation, contributor experience, user research, feedback, asynchronous communication

Tools discussed: contributor guide, status reports, release notes, roadmap, blog, real-time chat, video conferencing 

Articles

• NEW 3 Performance Tips for Your Next Project: Tips for making your process more refined and predictable when it comes to starting, developing, and maintaining fast websites.  
• NEW on dev.to: 2 Console Commands You Might Forget About: groupCollapsed and table 
• SOON We Couldn’t Go Faster Using Quicklinks 
• SOON Scrolling to the Top in CSS (dev.to) 

Documentation 

Content production

• PLANNED Add topic: Using Liquid in YAML
• PLANNED Update GraphQL topics for SEO 

Improvements, fixes

• UPDATED List of contributors on GitHub (includes icons for documentation, code, and tests contributions) 

Development

We are preparing to release a Liquid upgrade. Please find our release note for platformOS core in next week’s status report. 

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