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A Tweag engineer shares three real-world documentation strategies drawn from actual projects: reactive (restructuring a bloated README into an mdBook using the DiΓ‘taxis framework for Topiary), proactive (designing audience-segmented docs from scratch for a pharmaceutical omics tool), and integrated (using rustdoc to keep docs and code in sync for a Rust library). Key lessons include using DiΓ‘taxis to organize content by reader need, splitting docs by audience when users have distinct vocabularies, using narrative examples to improve retention, and treating documentation ambiguity as a bug. The post argues documentation is not a tax on code but an integral part of writing it.
Table of contents
When your README βs a monolithWhen you have varied audiencesWhen you need to have clarityDocument your code, maSort: