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• Bias towards loss and negative emotions associated with failure vs. success |
• Value of admitting mistakes and using them as opportunities for growth |
• Significance of documentation for developers and its role in unlocking understanding and productivity |
**Gehard Lazu:** The way I found out about the work that you do, Kathy, is by Jerod logging a news item, and the title was Maybe It's Time to Re-think the docs, and I was thinking, "Yes, it is time to re-think the docs." |
And one of the things that I really liked about what you wrote - this was a blog post, I think on GitHub, if I remember correctly; I can't remember exactly which part. GitHub was really big. I think -- well, now I know that you were at GitHub at the time. Since, you've joined Vercel. And this is like an interesting beh... |
And the one thing which really resonated with me from what you wrote was that when you're stuck on a problem and you turn to the docs, there's a moment of magic when you find the solution; you try it out and it all works. And that's really clicked, because that's exactly what you would want the docs to do. When you're ... |
**Kathy Korevec:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** What made you capture it so well? Because it was perfect. |
**Kathy Korevec:** Well, thank you. I think probably what made me capture it so well is that I've been working with a team of writers for the past couple of years, and they have taught me a lot about how to write. I noticed that my writing got a lot better and I became a much more of a stickler for good structure and d... |
But I think for me, I'm really passionate about enabling any developer anywhere in the world to build and ship world-class software, regardless of where they are or what machine they're on. And I think that unlocking that moment of like, "I have built something and now it works" is really, really important to me. Not o... |
My family - I am from a family of musicians and artists, and I was the scientist. And I was always kind of like, "What I'm into is not what they're into." I'm into coding and mathematics, and I was actually really into a lot of like animal science and things like that. So I was very different. |
So when I figured out like, how to make websites, it was kind of at this moment of like, "I feel like I, in a way, belong", because I was making something that could be considered a work of art. I was never that good, but that moment of magic of making something and seeing it work was really important to me. |
And I've been blocked before, and even on just simple things that are rudimentary, that I do all the time, that I don't always remember what the syntax is or whatever, going to the documentation and having it very clearly laid out for me, was really important just to get me back to the business of coding, basically. |
I think docs are very, very important, and I used to subscribe to the belief of like docs are a crutch to enable poor user experience, or things like that... And that definitely was a long, long time ago. But I believe that and I've definitely grown out of that thinking. I think docs are part of the product. And the mo... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that's really important, because as someone that writes code, gets out there and just has to answer, "Does it work? Does it do what I think it does? Does it address the problem that our users have?" That's great, but to go beyond that; there's so much more. And that's almost like level one. We... |
**Kathy Korevec:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Docs play a very important role. And it doesn't mean that your software or your system or whatever you have is not self-explanatory. It doesn't mean that. The crutch - you've put it perfectly. It's not that; it's another layer, another perspective to your products, to what you build, to what you belie... |
**Kathy Korevec:** I really strongly believe that docs are an API to the product, and we need to treat that -- like, there are several different interfaces... There's the SDK, there's the web, there's the application and then there's documentation; it's an interface for the code. And when you think about it that way, i... |
At GitHub we saw a lot of our documentation was used by people who were very new to the platform. And that makes sense. I think a lot of documentation teams probably see similar kinds of traffic. And I think for those kinds of users, it's like it's on us to connect the dots for them, and make sure that they're onboardi... |
Take Vercel -- I’m at Vercel right now. Take Vercel as an example. We could have people joining and signing up for Vercel all day long. But if they get frustrated and they can't deploy their site, they're probably not going to come back, and they're probably going to go to one of our competitors. Now, that's totally fi... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That makes a lot of sense to me. And I really get it. Through and through, for years, same page, definitely same page. But I'm wondering, for someone that is focused 80-90 percent to just shipping code, what would you tell to that person when it comes to the documentation |
**Kathy Korevec:** Yeah, so the one of the pieces of feedback I hear a lot is that developers don't like to context-switch between working in their IDE or looking at -- getting stuck looking at code, going back and forth to all these different tools, they're working in the CLI, they might need to go to github.com or ve... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that makes a lot of sense. And I'm almost wondering, if someone that really cares about code, shipping good code - would tests be optional? I think the answer is no for the majority. What about actually getting the code out in production? Is that optional? |
I would like to think that for most of our listeners it's not, right? You want to see your code in production, you want to understand the behavior at production scales, so on and so forth. So the natural question is, why are docs optional? Why do you think they're optional? So why do you think docs aren't optional? |
**Kathy Korevec:** Well, I think they're not... Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. |
**Kathy Korevec:** There's a little bit of philosophy here, and I think it probably depends on -- the answer probably depends on who you talk to. But my philosophy is that the product doesn't exist until it's documented. And the reason for that, and I think you can probably connect the dots, is that I really feel that ... |
But I do think that the reason why a lot of people, maybe people don't think docs are optional, or maybe they haven't thought about this question to the extent that I think would really benefit them if they do deep-dive into this, is that a lot of times you're up against a timeline and you want to get stuff out. And do... |
If you think about writers almost as designers, but at the end of your iteration, they can really help you improve a lot of those details over time. And if you do that, then you're constantly kind of writing documentation alongside, as the software is being developed, and iterating on that documentation to make it bett... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that's exactly right. And that's how \[unintelligible 00:14:37.22\] even started, when you said that we need to bring the docs closer to where the code writing happens. And having writers involved with that process is one way, but what happens when you have a smaller team where you have, I won... |
**Kathy Korevec:** Yeah, I mean -- we're in this situation right now at Vercel, we're hiring technical writers, but we don't have any on staff. We have documentation, we have great documentation for Next.js and Vercel. How did that happen? |
So I think that the people who know the most about a product are the people who are building it. And the benefit of this kind of situation is that you can get those people to write the documentation. And that's often what happens, but you kind of have to have this ethic that I talked about, which is like documentation ... |
And when I was at Heroku, we were in the same situation. We had documentation, but we didn't have writers. And the product team -- a lot of people would say it falls on the product’s team shoulders to write the documentation, or it falls on the engineers’ shoulders. I think it's an opportunity to express what you have ... |
That said, we do have people in both situations at Vercel and at Heroku, we do have people thinking about the documentation system and thinking about how to write good articles, and providing that information to the rest of the team in a form of a system - system notes, system documents etc. So that when you do go to -... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that makes a lot of sense. |
**Kathy Korevec:** If you don't have any of those people, have a champion. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes, have a champion. Okay, so someone that reminds you of the importance... Someone like you, right? Hey, docs is important. This is why it's important. This is what that looks like, so on and so forth. |
**Kathy Korevec:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So that makes a lot of sense. Product people helping with the documentation, if you don't have writers. It helps to have writers for the taxonomy, for the structure, for like the higher-level concepts that are specific to writing, what makes good writing, which is very important... And you mentioned h... |
But what about -- I'm just a developer, okay? I have to write my code, write my tests, preferably first, commit, push, get it out there, get it in production." At what point should I, the developer, write the docs? |
**Kathy Korevec:** You hit on a good point, which is -- I don't want to underestimate the work that it takes to write good docs. I think technical writers are -- and this may be controversial to say, but I think they're undervalued in the industry. I think especially technical writers, for very technical tools, for dev... |
So when you find these people who work on these small teams like this, they're brilliant and they can do a ton of things; not just writing, but most of the time, they want to do writing, because that's what they've chosen to do for their profession. So I definitely don't want to undervalue them and say that their job c... |
But I think if you don't have a technical writer on your team, you can do things like document as you're going, and that's kind of what I was talking about before, where it's like, treat documentation and writing as part of your development process. You know, that introduces another step in a lot of ways, and something... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So the way I understand, there are about three stages. The first stage, the incipient one, is docs don't exist. Now, that's stage zero, and that's a bad one to be. That's maybe the worst one to be in, just ignore docs altogether. |
**Kathy Korevec:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** The first stage, the first proper stage is to write some docs the best you can as a developer, as you build a feature. Don't leave them last, because you'll forget; think about the user. If anything, it forces you to think about the end user more as you write the docs. How will they be consuming this?... |
Then, as a product team, encourage the product team to help writing the docs, because they have a higher level of perspective, a deeper, longer, wider, however you want to take it - just a larger point of view into how this feature fits in the product, and that helps. But what you should really be doing - and this is l... |
**Kathy Korevec:** Yeah, definitely. You know, you mentioned the human aspect of it, and I think that's really important. One of the things that I talked about in that article is writing documentation that can be flexible for how people learn; people learn in many different ways. I am a very visual person, and so I lik... |
Some people, and I envy them, but just reading helps them learn. And so I think it's really important, if you can, think about documentation in a way that meets people's needs, and helps them learn in different ways. And one of the things that we started to look into at GitHub was - you know, just take the simple artic... |
And then you can also - maybe in the same place where you have the interactive element, you have a toggle between interactive or video. And then if you're watching a video, have it be somebody just literally showing their screen, walking through the steps of that article, because the point isn't necessarily to talk abo... |
**Break:** \[23:25\] to \[25:40\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** This is exactly what I was thinking about hearing you talk about documentation itself - most think it is just text; walls and walls of text, man pages. They have their place, but that's not the type of documentation that we are thinking about. And that's actually the second thing, which I really loved... |
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