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Just Say No To :nodoc: and Document Your Code! by Loren Segal

3,727 views · Published 13 December 2011 · 38:28 · Indexed 23 October 2026

Channel: Confreaks · 2011 · Science & Technology

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Nobody said it was going to be easy, but documentation is an important part of making your libraries and tools usable by others. Without good documentation, your users will have a hard time adopting your code. But what is "good documentation", anyway? This talk will outline what is important to communicate in our documentation, how we should write it, and what makes documentation "good". We will look at some common pitfalls we come across when documenting libraries and frameworks, and how we can use tools like YARD to make it easier to document code. We will see how writing documentation should really not be an afterthought, but an important part of the entire coding process, and how it can be used to validate the design of your library or framework as you write it. Ultimately, this talk will show you how documentation can inform your development process and lead to stable working APIs from the get-go rather than simply leaving your documentation to the end.

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