Creating Excellent Developer Docs and Content  ## Metadata - Author: [[The State of Developer Education]] - Full Title: Creating Excellent Developer Docs and Content - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/933c1320-64f0-4e83-bda2-328409af00a3 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - Episode AI notes 1. Accurate code snippets are crucial for developers to explore APIs or SDKs independently 2. Inaccurate code snippets can lead to frustration and loss of trust in the product 3. Assigning ownership of code comments and documentation is crucial for quality documentation 4. Distribution of responsibilities for documenting code and creating user-facing documentation should be clearly defined ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/episode-takeaways/58a7e273-5866-4c55-b0ea-87b824145dee)) - Importance of Accurate Code Snippets and Documentation Ownership in Development Good documentation should include accurate code snippets to facilitate developers' exploration of APIs or SDKs independently. Inaccurate code snippets can lead to frustration and loss of trust in the product, potentially resulting in customers terminating deals. Developers commonly face challenges when documentation is unreliable, causing some to discontinue using certain APIs. Assigning ownership of code comments and documentation is crucial, prompting the discussion on whether engineers should self-document in an API spec or if a content and technical writing team should translate it. The distribution of responsibilities for documenting code, commenting, and creating user-facing documentation needs to be clearly defined to ensure the overall quality of the documentation. Transcript: Speaker 4 The bare minimum of having good documentation is having accurate code snippets so you can take paste into VS code or some compiler and be able to run with that information and start exploring The API or start exploring the SDK product on your own as a developer. And once you hit a point where things stop working, that's when developers get really frustrated and we've heard of customers who end the deals. Maybe that's a little dramatic, but we've heard of a couple scenarios of that where they can't trust the product because they can't trust the documentation. Speaker 3 I've certainly churned from using a particular API because I ran into a unresolvable problem in the docs. I think that's actually a common experience for a lot of developers. One of the things you touched on though is this idea of getting engineers to leave comments and write docs. I'd love to hear from our panelists, who owns what part of that? Our engineers responsible for self-documenting in an open API spec or something in a way that can be generated, is it up to a content and technical writing team to translate that into Good docs? How do you actually approach the distribution of responsibilities for docs, comments, and maybe the user facing part of that? ([Time 0:06:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/50319235-6c83-4a46-a19e-6b2bef5099aa))