Photo by Aliaksei Semirski on Pexels. We’ve all been there. The team is firing on all cylinders, cranking out innovative new features. The documentation is perfect! It’s comprehensive, clear, and included right in the Pull Request. Then, six months later, a bug report comes in. Somewhere along the way, a developer changed a timeout value, renamed a key in a JSON response, or updated a UI label, and…the documentation didn’t move an inch. ...
Photo by ThisIsEngineering on Pexels. There’s a specific feeling you get when documentation actually works. It’s not relief, exactly. It’s more like the feeling of asking a question and getting a straight answer from someone who knows what they’re talking about. Someone who anticipated what you needed, skipped the parts you already knew, and told you what to do without talking down to you. ...
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels. AI tools are everywhere in documentation conversations right now, but most of the discussion stays abstract. This is a concrete account of how I integrated Claude into MinIO’s documentation workflow: what I used it for. how I structured that use. what it measurably changed about how the team worked. The Starting Point Technical documentation for a product like MinIO lives close to the codebase. Keeping it accurate means tracking software releases, triaging GitHub issues, auditing existing content, and staying current with a fast-moving engineering team. All while writing new content and updating existing content. The surface area is large and the feedback loops are long. ...
Photo by Adam Dubec on Pexels. If you look at a standard corporate org chart, you’ll see neat little boxes. Engineering is over here, Product is over there, Sales is on the other side of the building (or the virtual workspace), and Support is tucked away in the corner. ...
Modernizing Documentation at Cloud Scale In the world of high-performance distributed systems, documentation is more than just a manual. Instead, the docs serve as a critical component of the user’s infrastructure. During my tenure as a Senior Technical Writer at MinIO, I transitioned from being a content creator to a “Documentation Architect.” My GitHub contributions reflect the level of work: My GitHub metric contributions for the year leading up to February 2026. ...
Photo by Brett Jordan at Pexels. In the Write the Docs Slack community, folks often ask how to go about deciding what documentation tool or set of tools is the right one to use. I have taken to replying often with a series of questions, instead of answering. Why the Socratic method? Because tooling for docs is a very, very circumstance-specific choice. No one answer is correct. As I have often said in Write the Docs and elsewhere, I firmly believe that a good technical writer can create great docs with pretty much any toolset. Yes, even Microsoft Word, though we might shudder while doing so. ...
Photo by Startup Stock Photos from Pexels. Curious about what a technical writer can do for you? Here are twenty-five things you might find a technical writer doing in their job on any given day: Interviewing a subject matter expert to learn more about what they are writing about. This might be a product manager, project lead, developer, customer, salesperson, developer advocate, end user, nearly anyone who might touch or use what we are a writing about. ...
Photo by Samson Katt on Pexels. Good docs have (at least) six key characteristics: Findable For documentation to be worth the time spent creating it, the user needs to be able to get to those docs when a problem or curiosity creates a need for information. The best docs do nobody any good if they can’t put their hands or eyes on them when they need them. ...
Photo by Alexas Fotos from Pexels. There are many flavors of technical writing. Mine is software. One of the constants of any software team is the change that comes with employee churn. People find new opportunities by joining your team. People find new opportunities and leave your team for elsewhere. ...
Photo by Moose Photos from Pexels. I would like to thank the tech writers in the Write the Docs Slack’s #lone-writer channel for bringing these ideas to the top of my mind. Everyone suffers from a bias of familiarity when looking at our docs. Once you read something once, the next time you read it the mind can anticipate and insert what it remembers and expects to be there. This happens whether the expected word or phrase or punctuation is there or not. ...