Hello
Thoughts on technical documentation from within the semiconductor and medical device industries. Scalable, practical, and modern examples that support enterprise-level structures.
See my LinkedIn page for more information on what I do professionally or to contact me.
David ImageSunsetting PDFs
HTML-only output for a more efficient workflow. Users can browser-print PDFs when requiring portability.
Generating clean text for LLM processing
Preprocessing hundreds of complex documents into a suitable format for future AI API analysis.
Using GitLab as a Component Authoring system
Ensure critical customer data only exists in one place.
Redline changes
Ensure a clear markup between version for complex and long documents to help reduce review fatigue and improve quality.
Automating CHANGELOGs via enforced commit message conventions
Maintaining CHANGELOGs for engineering documentation is a challenge. Ensuring a clear commit message convention reduces complexity and improves functionality.
One-click templating
Using Jinja and Cookiecutter to instantly create documents in your company's style and configuration.
Automating style checks
A scalable solution to enhance our documentation quality across large and distributed authoring teams.
Integrating an external DMS into pipeline
You may be required to archive documents in a specific DMS system.
Multi-variant documents
One document that shares content with several outputs. You could use this method where you have a single product with customer specific content blocks. Or your product is mostly similar with another product.
Protecting content
How we can realistically protect content whilst ensuring usability?
Source data to customer content flow
Using python to extract data from engineering systems, clean it, then parse it for user documentation.
Documentation and Information Architecture
A synthesized list of key tasks related to structuring and maintaining an enterprise-level documentation management system.
Automatically building drafts
Using a CI/CD pipeline and Git to produce timestamped draft PDFs and DOCX files
DevOps for documentation
Automatically testing and deploying documentation using a CI/CD pipeline
Readability analysis
Quickly cleaning text and generating a readability score
Converting documentation
Using common tools, we can quickly convert .docx or .tex files to .rst
Documentation workflow
A graphic showing the key steps in a docs-as-code workflow approach.
Change request workflow
A simple and auditable change request workflow that incorporates merge request approvers.
Analyzing document changes
We can use git-diff or a document lifecycle tool to analyze changes between any document versions.
Change request management
Using GitLab as a document lifecycle tool gives us strong collaboration and change request functionality.
My docs-as-code toolchain
I use a set of open-source and well document tools to create and manage documentation at an organizational level.
Organizational level content analysis
We can use Regex to identify stylistic errors or asses the impact of content changes.
Version control
Using Git as a tool to version control documentation gives us complete transparency and control over content updates.
Applying structured data
Using controlled templates to write DITA and Schema.org compliant content helps us write more functionally.
Applying a Docs-as-Code approach to QMS
Creating documentation correctly in the first instance removes the need for secondary Quality Management Systems (QMS) or Document Management System (DMS) software. Integrating Gitlab as a DevOps tool for documentation is a lightweight and scalable way to enhance a QMS.
Developing documentation remotely
With the COVID-19 virus pandemic changing the way companies apply work from home policies, a Docs-as-Code approach to documentation facilitates remote collaboration on a larger scale.
Creating technical documents
General information on using Sphinx or Pandoc to create scalable technical documentation using Docs-as-Code principles.