Ask HN: Any Sugestions for Proceures Documentation?
4 comments
The tools to author it aren't that important, frankly. Ask your audience what they're most comfortable using and try to meet them there.
If the stakeholders are technical, you have more options. If they aren't, I hope you like Google Docs or Word, because if you give them anything other than that or a PDF, they'll probably complain. At worst, yeah, write it in a long Markdown text file and use tools like pandoc to transform that into other formats as needed.
If you do need a website and you're not generating enterprise-scale amounts of content (and it sounds like you're not) try things that let you avoid needing build steps and infrastructure if at all possible, so you can iterate and deploy changes with as little friction as you can.
Tools like Docsify[1] can take a pile of Markdown files and serve a site out of them, client- or server-side, without a static build step. Depending on the org, you can get away with GitHub's default rendering of Markdown in a repo. Most static site builds for stuff your scale are overengineered instances of premature optimization.
Past those initial hurdles, the format and tools challenges are all in maintenance. How can you:
- most easily keep the content up to date
- delegate updates as the staff grows or changes
- proactively distribute updates ASAP to the people who'd most benefit from receiving them
That's going to depend a lot more on who'll contribute updates, what their technical proficiency's like, and how they prefer to communicate. It might be a shared git repo and RSS or Slack notifications if they're comfortable with those things, and it might be a Google Doc and email if they're like most non-technical stakeholders.
1: https://docsify.js.org
If the stakeholders are technical, you have more options. If they aren't, I hope you like Google Docs or Word, because if you give them anything other than that or a PDF, they'll probably complain. At worst, yeah, write it in a long Markdown text file and use tools like pandoc to transform that into other formats as needed.
If you do need a website and you're not generating enterprise-scale amounts of content (and it sounds like you're not) try things that let you avoid needing build steps and infrastructure if at all possible, so you can iterate and deploy changes with as little friction as you can.
Tools like Docsify[1] can take a pile of Markdown files and serve a site out of them, client- or server-side, without a static build step. Depending on the org, you can get away with GitHub's default rendering of Markdown in a repo. Most static site builds for stuff your scale are overengineered instances of premature optimization.
Past those initial hurdles, the format and tools challenges are all in maintenance. How can you:
- most easily keep the content up to date
- delegate updates as the staff grows or changes
- proactively distribute updates ASAP to the people who'd most benefit from receiving them
That's going to depend a lot more on who'll contribute updates, what their technical proficiency's like, and how they prefer to communicate. It might be a shared git repo and RSS or Slack notifications if they're comfortable with those things, and it might be a Google Doc and email if they're like most non-technical stakeholders.
1: https://docsify.js.org
thanks !
A doc that doesn't get updated quickly becomes either useless or dangerous. Creating documentation in a tool that doesn't allow easy updating increases the chances that it won't get updated. I think wikis or Google docs are the simplest.
thanks !
I'm a senior network engineer working at this moment in operations, and have been asked to create procedures for the new staff.
Things like how to troubleshoot some service, or restore some backup, and other sysadmin stuff.
Can you suggest me any way to do it other than some Word / PDF / Wiki page?
I have been working the past year in automation (with Ansible, Python, Yang/Netconf, etc.) and I guess there should be a better way to do it in 2023 than produce a long TXT file.
Any suggestion of standards, tools, languages, etc. will be very appreciated.