From The Blog

03 Jan
2023

Generating a nice-looking PDF with Pandoc

Pandoc is one of my favourite tools in the world. If you haven’t come across it before, it converts between more or less any two document formats. I use it a lot with MarkDown and ReStructuredText so that I can produce content efficiently and then share it in a way that looks nice, but also to get word documents into cleaner formats. However the PDF output has always looked a little bit … dated? (this is rich from an rst2pdf maintainer I know!) and I was recently delighted to find some tricks that resulted in a better PDF. I’m sharing them here, so I can find them again in the future; you are welcome to use them too, of course! Continue reading →

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08 Nov
2022

Sphinx extensions for developer portals

I’ve been gushing about docs-as-code, but realised that I haven’t shared many hands-on tips for actually building different types of sites in this sort of toolchain. I’ve been mostly using Sphinx which generates much better-looking documentation than its website suggests. It’s a python-based static site generator, with a thriving community and lots of great extensions. Today I thought I’d share the extensions I use the most for developer portals (like the Aiven docs, one of my work projects and the source of the screenshots in this post) and what I like about them. Spoiler: may contain a theme as well as the extensions.

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26 Sep
2022

Internal DevRel: Colleague Enablement

I work in Developer Relations for a very technical company (Aiven), and I usually describe my job as half explaining my employer’s technology to developers, and half explaining developers to my employers. However in the last year or so, I’ve realised that there is a variation on this theme that is impactful for my internal colleagues: explaining technology and developers to people who are experts in something else. I work with specialists in various aspects of sales and marketing (DevRel reports into Marketing) and my colleagues are genuinely curious to know more about the domain we work in! I thought I’d share more about how I enable my colleagues, and why I think it works for us. Continue reading →

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Talks, Articles, Podcasts, and More

Article

Write documentation like you develop code


opensource.com, October 2022
Slides

Engineering Documentation


GOTO Copenhagen, October 2022
Butterfly

Neglecting Open Source Developers Puts the Internet at Risk


Dark Reading, September 2022
Article

What does a successful developer look like?


Silicon Republic, June 2022
Slides

Landscape of Open Source Databases


EMFCamp, June 2022
Article

How to accelerate your software development career


Computing, May 2022