Tag Archives: documentation

05 Jun
2025

Publish to GitHub pages with Sphinx

I’m a big fan of docs-as-code for more or less any type of content publishing, but I’m less of a fan of Jekyll, the default tool used in GitHub pages. I also prefer ReStructuredText over Markdown as a markup format, so Sphinx is definitely on my shortlist of SSGs (Static Site Generators) for my projects. I recently switched the rst2pdf docs to using Sphinx hosted on GitHub pages, so here are my setup notes. Continue reading →
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 →