FastAPI is a modern Python web framework for building APIs. FastAPI is a great choice for building simple APIs, and it comes with built-in support for generating OpenAPI documentation. In this post we will look at how to generate and...

Documentation has been one of the earliest fields to see large changes due to ChatGPT, and more recently GPT-4. Especially technical documentation, being in the intersection of AI-tinkerers (programmers) and written content, has seen a lot of movement. We’ve seen...

So you’ve heard about docs-as-code and are wondering if it’s right for your project. When deciding whether to implement docs-as-code for your documentation projects, it’s essential to weigh the unique aspects of your project, such as quality standards, project requirements,...

Most APIs today are designed as RESTful APIs. REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architectural style for designing networked applications. RESTful APIs use HTTP to expose resources and perform operations on them using standard HTTP verbs, such as POST, GET,...

We are happy to announce that Doctave is now open for you to try! 🎉 The free trial lets you try all of Doctave’s features. Sign up at doctave.com. Doctave is a platform for creating and hosting public and private...

Markdown is a commonly used markup format used for blogs, documentation, and other longform content. It translates easily into HTML, and is easy for humans to read in its raw form. We use Markdown heavily at Doctave (since our product...

Usually people think of technical documentation as helping existing users. Documentation lets customers find answers to questions themselves. It reduces load on your support team. But when you are selling to developers, your technical documentation is a sales tool. Your...

OpenAPI, previously known as “Swagger”, is a specification for describing HTTP APIs. Since its initial release in 2011, it has become a commonly adopted tool for companies to generate documentation and client implementations for their endpoints. In this post we...

We’re incredibly excited to announce that Doctave’s developer documentation is publicly available. You can find it at https://docs.doctave.com. Our closed beta in Doctave since October 2022. So far all our documentation has been behind a password, meaning that only teams...

We took the arguably unusual choice to build a desktop app for documentation. If you look around, documentation tools generally fall in 2 categories: open source CLI tools, and cloud-based WYSIWYG editors. In this post we’ll talk about the reasoning...

How do you know your documentation is good? How do you know if it is answering the most common questions users encounter? Is it easy to navigate and search? Is the language accessible and understandable by the target audience? And...

You probably like docs-as-code. What’s not to love? Technical writers can collaborate with developers via source control and Markdown-based static site generators are powerful and flexible publishing tools. This is in contrast to traditional XML-based publishing systems which make it...

This post references an old version of Doctave You can read more about our new documentation platform here. This is the second installment of our changelog series. We’re starting the new year with a number of new features. This is...

This post references an old version of Doctave You can read more about our new documentation platform here. This is the first in a series of posts where we want to talk more publicly about the features we’re building and...

If your software documentation lives in a Wiki, it’s very likely out of date and possibly actively harming your engineering team’s productivity. This is a story that repeats in almost every organization - a tool like Confluence or Notion is...

This post references an old version of Doctave You can read more about our new documentation platform here. The Doctave CLI is a free to use open source documentation generator. It takes your Markdown files and converts them into a...

Most software engineers know that they should write documentation. But how many can articulate exactly why documentation is needed? Let’s look into some of the reasons. 1. Productive engineers The lack of good documentation is often cited by engineers as...

Many technical problems ultimately turn out to be people problems, and a lack of good documentation is no exception. Writing and maintaining documentation is a habit that needs to be encouraged and nurtured. The unfortunate truth is that no amount...

A lot of internal technical documentation lives in corporate knowledge bases, wikis, or some sort of collaborative editing system. We built Doctave to serve a different approach: docs-as-code (sometimes called docs-like-code). Let’s dive into what this approach is and what...

This post references an old version of Doctave You can read more about our new documentation platform here. Doctave.com is primarily built on the Elixir language. Specifically the Phoenix Web framework. Some key parts of our stack however are built...

This post references an old version of Doctave You can read more about our new documentation platform here. We are excited to announce that Doctave.com is now in public beta. Doctave.com is the best place to host your docs-as-code documentation,...

This post references an old version of Doctave You can read more about our new documentation platform here. Today we are announcing Doctave, a batteries-included documentation site generator. With built-in Mermaid JS diagram support, full-text search, a live-reloading development server,...

Some companies and software projects become outright famous for their excellent developer documentation - Stripe, Twilio, and Django to name a few. Let’s look at the building blocks that make these and other projects’ documentation so great. We will look...

The Agile Manifesto values “working software over comprehensive documentation”. This has led to some to believe that documentation has little value in a modern software development workflow - that’s a mistake. Let’s look at what role documentation can play in...

The majority of companies I’ve worked at have used Confluence. And the one thing you can be sure of is that any documentation you have written there will be hopelessly out of date. (This post was originally published on Nik’s...