Tag Archives: documentation

23 Feb
2016

Documentation First: A Recipe for API Success

I've shipped a handful of greenfield APIs in recent months for different clients, and in each case I've been building the documentation before the API. I hadn't really recognised it as a pattern until someone else commented on it, but I do find this approach has worked well for my projects, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on this in a bit more detail. Continue reading →
21 Jan
2015

Gollum the Git-Enabled Wiki

In trying to get company documentation off google docs and people's laptops and into a more useful format, I have been researching developer-friendly tools for business documentation. Requirements went something like:
- must handle words and documents
- should be available locally, bonus points for revision history
- must publish to the web, and ideally be editable there
- should accept content in markdown
- must have access control (which wiped out my original plan of using a static site generator)

While I worked on this, we were using the wiki feature in GitLab ... which pretty much hit the nail on the head. Further investigation showed that the wiki feature in GitLab (and indeed in GitHub) is a ruby gem called Gollum. Continue reading →