The art of reading the docs

Documentation. You can treat it as a dictionary or reference manual that you look up things in when you get stuck during your day-to-day work OR (and this is where things get interesting) you can immerse yourself in a subject, domain, or technology by deeply and purposefully consuming its manuals cover-to-cover to develop expertise, not just passing familiarity.

In this episode we pull in perspectives and anecdotes from beginners and veterans alike to understand the impact of RTFM deeply. Also Sweet Filepath O’ Mine?!?!

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Code-ish by Heroku – A podcast from the team at Heroku, exploring code, technology, tools, tips, and the life of the developer. Check out episode 101 for a deep dive with Cornelia Davis (CTO of Weaveworks) on cloud native, cloud native patterns, and what is really means to be a cloud native application. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Equinix Metal – Globally interconnected fully automated bare metal. Equinix Metal gives you hardware at your fingertips with physical infrastructure at software speed. This is the promise of the cloud delivered on Bare Metal. Get $500 in free credit to play with plus a rad t-shirt at info.equinixmetal.com/changelog.
Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog

Featuring:

Ian Lopshire – Twitter, GitHub
Johnny Boursiquot – Twitter, GitHub, Website
Kris Brandow – Twitter, GitHub
Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

You could win Mark Bates’ Raspberry Pi 400! Thanks to Eric Miller for requesting this episode! You, too, can request episodes right here.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!