28 Jan
2026

Git renames are not renames

I consider myself pretty git-confident, I’ve worked with it a lot, taught it, been a git consultant, run engineering and various things-as-code teams. This week I had a spectactular git problem where merging one branch into another produced changes that didn’t exist on either branch. Turns out, renaming directories in a monorepo with multiple almost-identical boilerplate documentation files comes with surprises… Continue reading →
25 Jan
2026

Manage Diagrams in AsciiDoc on GitHub

I use a lot of asciidoc these days for work documentation (and I love it) and I’ve been so happy that GitHub renders it when you view a repository in the web browser, just like it does for Markdown and ReStructuredText. BUT what GitHub does not do is render the image types that asciidoc does so even though I’m working with asciidoc and PlantUML, and the asciidoc tools render those diagrams nicely in PDF and HTML output – GitHub’s rendering doesn’t. So here’s a quick overview of how I handle those repositories. Continue reading →
08 Dec
2025

Tag Kinds in OpenAPI 3.2

OpenAPI tags have always been annoying: user-supplied arbitrary data for endpoints should be a fabulous feature – but the documentation tools seem to think that tags are only for them so it becomes more difficult to use tags for other purposes. In fact it is very useful to be able to tag endpoints with lots of different categories of data and so in OpenAPI 3.2, tags were enhanced to include an additional “kind” field so that different kinds of tag could be used. Continue reading →
04 Dec
2025

Nested tags in OpenAPI 3.2

OpenAPI has always had support for simple tags, but the OpenAPI 3.2 release brought in some serious tag upgrades including a summary field, a “kind” field with registry, – and the ability to nest tags which is the focus of today’s post. If one level of organisation isn’t enough for your API (and on bigger APIs I’d argue it shouldn’t be) then the ability to indicate which tag is the parent of this tag will be a good feature to adopt when you upgrade your OpenAPI descriptions. Continue reading →
16 Nov
2025

Notification Contexts Matter

Like many of you, my days are dominated by notifications. Emails from project management systems, source control systems, calendar invitations, ticket updates, and message about messages on other platforms. I’ve noticed that some people use notifications as a power tool, while others seem blind to what happens when they do something. So this post is some tips that I’ve picked up along the way. Continue reading →
17 Sep
2025

Quick local API docs with Scalar

Today I’m sharing a quick-and-dirty script to take an OpenAPI description, spin up a docs server locally, and copy the URL into your clipboard. I also use a bit of glob expansion in my script to find the right folder, because I have a lot of APIs with long and formulaic directory names (TM Forum members know this story). I’m spinning up Scalar here as it’s my current favourite just-works local API docs platform. Continue reading →
21 Jul
2025

API Specificity with Overlays and Enums

The more I work on API standards, the more I realise how few teams understand that they can adopt the standards and, without breaking any contract, adapt them to make a strong interface for their own application. One of my favourite examples is to add enums where a standard interface cannot dictate the exact values, but in your own implementation it is very helpful to do so. Continue reading →
10 Jun
2025

Safe Screensharing Setup

In my time I’ve spent a LOT of time on screenshare, and I’m confident sharing my screen. Part of the confidence comes from maintaining a usage pattern that means I CAN confidently share my screen and rarely embarrass myself. After sharing some tips with a former colleague recently, I have tried to package up the best bits of that conversation and turn it into some tips to share. Continue reading →
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 →
28 Apr
2025

Just Enough Docs

Too many open source projects suffer from inadequate documentation, and that hurts their adoption, their communities, and puts more burden on maintainers. Many people who create open source software don’t see see themselves as writers, but today I’m sharing tips for documenting open source projects without it needing to take up a huge amount of time to get something published and ready for (docs) contributions. Continue reading →