Open Source & Feelings 2015 - Documentation as Empathy by Eric Holscher

Documentation as Empathy by Eric Holscher This talk will cover my view of documentation within programming culture as it has grown over the years. As a primary person involved with Read the Docs (the largest open source doc hosting website) and Write the Docs (the largest OSS doc conference), I have seen a lot of angles, and appreciate documentation more every year. I believe better documentation is a fundamental aspect of how we can improve programming culture, and an often misunderstood part of outreach and education. Projects with good documentation are able to get contributors in a much more reliable fashion, and, more importantly, projects without documentation only attract users who have time to waste. This talk will make you think more deeply about the social impact of documentation, and hopefully make you question if it should be a higher priority in your development. You should understand the role of documentation in both technical as well as social realms.