The mistake most devs make when trying to document their project is that they only make one (maybe two) types of documentation based on a readme template and/or what their mental model of a newcomer needs.
Devs need to be actively taught that:
- Good documentation isn’t one thing, it’s four. To have good documentation, you need all four distinct types of documentation.
- What the four types of documentation are (this is discussed in the link)
If you don’t have all four types of documentation, you have bad documentation.
I feel like the original source for this is diataxis.fr.
Yeah it looks like it, I wonder if the authors there had some sort of professional relationship with my link’s host
Hey, I just found that it is common to think that divio plagiarized from diataxis. It is not. A person at divio came up with this and asked permission to spin it off into its own website.
I just learned this from footnote at this article: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/problems-with-the-4doc-model/#fn:diataxis