Documentation

Creating docs that actually work means knowing what to write, how to write it, and where it belongs. In this episode, we break down the diataxis documentation framework—a simple but powerful system that splits docs into four clear types: tutorials, how-to guides, explanations, and reference. We look at examples of tools that have implemented diataxis to write their documentation with clarity and purpose.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Links:
   •  Diataxis
   •  Sequin
   •  Layercode
   •  Logdy

Lee Robinson helped Vercel grow to $200M+ in ARR and scaled the Next.js community to over 1.3 million active developers. I dive into his blog posts to uncover valuable insights and lessons about how he achieved this success, covering topics like docs, community building, developer education, marketing, and product development.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Links:
   •  Lee Robinson's blog
   •  Lee Robinson's X
   •  Peter Yang's interview
   •  swyx's interview
   •  Gonto on Scaling DevTools
   •  Developer Marketing Community

P.s. this is a new style of episode, let me know what you think. 

In this episode, I pull out some of the key DevTools lessons I've learned in the last 120 interviews. 

Including:

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. https://workos.com.

We dig into the the build vs. buy dilemma for APIs, and the role of OpenAPI in effective documentation.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

We explore how AI is transforming the landscape of APIs and developer tools, and discuss the future of coding.

In this conversation, Daksh Gupta, the CEO of Greptile - an AI code understanding API - shares:

There are more and more open source DevTools startups. I’ve interviewed dozens. But I am still confused about open source licenses. So I decided to ask questions to two people who actually understand them: my friends Eric and Matt - founders of open source background jobs tool Trigger.dev.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

What we discuss:

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Paul Klein is the founder and CEO of Browserbase - one of the fastest growing DevTools in 2024.

Browserbase is a headless browser API focused on helping AI Agent startups.

We dig into:

Shawn Wang (aka swyx) is the founder of smol.ai (AI news curation), and the cohost of Latent Space (popular AI Engineer podcast).

Plus, Shawn started the AI Engineer movement with his essay Rise of the AI Engineer and organized two incredible AI engineer conferences in the past twelve months - AI Engineer World's Fair and AI Engineer Summit

And Shawn has angel invested in DevTools like Airbyte, Railway, Supabase, Replay.io, Stackblitz, Flutterflow, Fireworks.ai while running the DevTools angels community.

Besides this, Shawn curates DX.tips (DevTools magazine) and in a past life wrote the Coding Career handbook, championed learn in public, cofounded Svelte Society and was previously Head of Developer Experience at Temporal, and a Developer Advocate at AWS and Netlify.

Also, before this, Shawn had a very successful career in investment banking, trading, building data pipelines and performing quantitate portfolio management. I think this brings him a very unique perspective - I've always admired his ability to zoom out and see the big picture and the trends.

Even though Shawn is now all-in on AI, he's still one of the go-to authorities on DevTools go-to-market.

As you can tell, Shawn is someone I deeply admire. So I'm glad he came back.

What we discuss:

Sagar is the CEO and co-founder of Speakeasy - an API tooling platform. We talk about the journey of Speakeasy. The challenges of startup life. How they developed the product and how they work with influencers in a surprising way.

Nick Gomez is the co-founder and CEO of InKeep. InKeep is an AI customer support tool focused on Developer Tools.

They discuss the importance of understanding developer needs, the role of AI in technical support, and how community engagement can enhance support efforts.

What we discuss

Keywords
AI support, developer tools, technical support, community engagement, customer investment, quality assurance, support team structure, 24/7 support, innovations in development

Han Wang is co-founder of Mintlify - modern, out the box documentation.

In this episode, Han shares the story of Mintlify and how to make great docs.

We even talk about the time Paul Graham told them to change their name.

What we cover:
- the origin story of Mintlify
- what is good documentation
- the process of documentation
- how AI is affecting documentation
- why PG told them to change their name

Links:
- Han https://han.dev/
- Mintlify https://mintlify.com/

How do you write a developer quick start guide that they will love?

That's what we talk about with Amit Jotwani. Amit is the founder of HelloDX and previously worked in developer experience at Retool and Amazon Alexa.

This came about because I was reading Amit's fantastic guide on EveryDeveloper.

Links:

Rob Moore is the CTO and founder of Churnkey - a tool that reduces churn for you automatically.
 
What we cover:
- Developer documentation
- How Rob buys tools
- How Rob discovers tools
- Go slow & build good things
- How Churnkey works

References:
- Rob's twitter https://twitter.com/robmoo_re
- Churnkey https://churnkey.co/
- Super docs super.so