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I mean, sure, you can do that at the end. I know that Amazon, with starting -- what was the name of the book? Hang on, let me just pick it up. Working Backwards. I forgot about it, there's just too many books. Working Backwards. That's a great way to start with a feature. Imagine it finished, imagine it in front of use... |
So I really like this about your article Kathy, where you, first of all, give an example of what GitHub docs look like in certain sections, and you give an example of what they should look like. I love that; it's so clear, even in the example itself. How did you come up with the idea? |
**Kathy Korevec:** The idea to introduce interactive elements? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes, interactive elements to expand people's horizons, that "Hey, it's not just text, it's actually videos. It's actually interactive elements." |
**Kathy Korevec:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Just open people's eyes to re-thinking docs, literally. That's the essence in my mind of that blog post. |
**Kathy Korevec:** Totally. So when I was at Heroku, there was a rule that we were never allowed to put any marketing into our documentation. And I really subscribed to that; like, yes, don't put marketing, don't get in a developer's way with trying to sell them things. And I think a lot of people take that to heart an... |
And so I was just thinking - you know, I constantly want to revisit, "Was this a good idea?" Just because we're doing it, it doesn't mean that we should be doing it. And you kind of fall into this trap of like, "Oh, well this is the way that it's been done forever." And so I really like to question that, question my ow... |
So I kind of took a step back and said, "Well, what if we introduce -- what if we talk about the value of what GitHub Actions is and introduce just a little bit of marketing?" And I realized, it wasn't marketing that I was introducing, I was introducing a story. And we should be able to tell the story of this feature, ... |
I looked around -- as a product manager, I looked around and did a bunch of competitive research. I saw that Netlify was adding videos. Why can't we add videos? CircleCI is adding tutorials that are not written by anybody on their team, they're written by the community. Why can't we have that in our documentation? |
So it's kind of this FOMO moment, of like, "Well, other people have this thing. I want this thing." And then I started to put it together... You can actually incorporate all of these elements into one screen, if you think about it like a system. And then it can start to help that product or that feature really come to ... |
But what's really interesting is -- you mentioned something that I really like, which is you're new to this project, you're new to a product, you want to test it out, and documentation is really important for people who are kind of new to something... I think that's very, very true, and in a lot of ways, I structured -... |
That said, we get a lot of -- at GitHub, we got a lot of traffic from people who are not new to GitHub, but were new to the documentation in certain ways, where they were like using GitHub for very predictable things... But then when GitHub Universe happened and we introduced a brand new feature, everybody would get re... |
I mentioned GitHub Actions... One of the things we did was we revamped the GitHub Actions page to where we weren't just documenting like a one to one, like I said, "Here's the UI. Here's the UI in text form." We were starting to incorporate a lot more of the community. |
So GitHub Actions - one of the coolest things about it is that the community writes these Actions and workflows. And they sometimes are hard to find... Especially if you're just getting started with GitHub Actions, you have to kind of like troll through a bunch of repositories, and go in and read somebody else's -- we ... |
So what we did was we actually built a component within the GitHub Actions page that pulled some of that information into the GitHub Actions documentation itself, and it allows you to search different code examples for how to use GitHub Actions. And I think that unlocked a lot of the a-ha for people, because they were ... |
That component was really easy to put together. It was literally like, we added some frontend code, and then it was me updating a YAML file with -- like, manually updating the YAML file with links to all of these repositories. I think I wrote a bunch of the description text myself, just to get it out there and see if p... |
And the final thing I'll say about this is wanting people to have that magic moment, and then seeing them have it is super-gratifying for anyone who is building a product. That was really fun, and that was very motivating for me to keep going. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** This makes a lot of sense in my head now. So I remember using GitHub Actions when it first came out... And I remember a lot of things being primordial, and just a lot of questions not being answered. And over time, it got better and better and better, to the point that I like it really much. I mean, a... |
You look at some examples, more advanced ones, all the different GitHub Actions you get from the marketplace, they also help and they have their own documentation, so that's good as well. The marketplace makes a big difference, but overall, it's a nice experience. And even though GitHub Actions itself, it has various l... |
And as a whole, it felt more human than any of the other CI systems that I used. And as I said, I went through many of them; look at the show notes, I'll drop a few, the most popular ones. But there's something to be said about the product. There's something to be said about the experience, whether it's a learning one,... |
**Kathy Korevec:** It really helps. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** ...a good product experience without good documentation. |
**Kathy Korevec:** I think what you're getting at is -- there's kind of like two things. Documentation is a detail that you should not overlook. When we first released GitHub Actions - this is a little bit of inside baseball, but when we first released GitHub Actions, and I think a lot of people who release a big produ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes. |
**Kathy Korevec:** And I think even the documentation - we released the initial documentation for GitHub Actions, and it was okay, but we needed, especially as the product evolved, we needed to iterate and keep up. And when I first started on the team, improving the documentation at GitHub as a whole was a big mandate ... |
And one of the things I learned in that experience was that it is really powerful seeing how other people do things. And not only for myself, but for other people. It's like, you go to Stack Overflow and you ask for an example, you're seeing how somebody else might solve your problem, and it's the same thing that we wa... |
**Break:** \[37:58\] to \[39:03\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** The one thing which I really liked about GitHub Actions is seeing how it changed week by week, month by month, and it's that journey that I was on by using GitHub Actions that felt comfortable. I knew that the shortcomings which it had will be addressed. I knew that the frustrations, the small ones, w... |
**Kathy Korevec:** How much did I have to do with that? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes. |
**Kathy Korevec:** Specifically on the GitHub Action side... So I was not on the GitHub Actions’ team. I worked closely with them, in that my direct colleagues are running that team. But one of the things that -- I can talk about it from a documentation standpoint, if that's what you mean... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes. |
**Kathy Korevec:** But one of the things that you're touching on, which I think is really, really important, is that when you started using GitHub Actions, it was a product that was in beta, basically. We had just shipped it, and there were some things that we needed to improve, and the team was really interested in co... |
At that moment, you are taking a huge leap of trust, because you're talking about putting a lot of probably your critical developer workflow infrastructure onto GitHub Actions. And in order to use CI/CD, and to use that integration is really, really important for the success of your products long-term. So you're trusti... |
And if we go back a couple years before, or like a year before I joined, GitHub had lost a lot of that trust with users. And I think very famously with the Dear GitHub letter. So the Dear GitHub letter, if people don't know what that is - it was a letter that was from the community, asking for certain features and cert... |
And so kind of in response to that, in response to losing the trust of some of our maintainers and some of our users, we decided to put together a project that I called \[unintelligible 00:42:02.18\] And we talked about this publicly, we talked about this -- we can link to it in the show notes... We talked about this i... |
But we decided to take some of those requests and rapidly iterate on them, rapidly iterate on our platform, to not only win the trust back of some folks who we consider very near and dear to the heart of GitHub and in the DNA of GitHub, but also to focus on the details, because the details are what matter for developer... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's right. |
**Kathy Korevec:** And we wanted to fix these small details. And over time, they add up to a huge win for our community and for these maintainers, and they paid off in dividends. And one of those dividends is trust. And so when you come to GitHub Actions for the first time and you're thinking, "I'm going to now put a c... |
And the GitHub Actions team shipped this thing, and then they said "Okay, well, there are certain parts of it that aren't perfect." And we are, like -- you're always striving for perfection, you're never going to hit it, and so it's good motivation to keep on fixing things as you go. |
And on the documentation side, we felt the same thing. We shipped the first set of documentation for GitHub Actions, and it wasn't great. We got a lot of feedback about it very publicly, about how we could improve GitHub Actions. |
And so when I started on the documentation team, I just kind of said "Well, one of the biggest frustrations from our community that I can see publicly and in the feedback we're getting just directly to the team is that the GitHub Actions documentation can be improved." So I picked that as my first thing to focus on whe... |
And some of the things I learned right away was that people had a hard time finding examples in the wild of what other people are doing, and they wanted to see that in order to -- there's a little bit of like "Let me see what other people doing so I can help contextualize it for myself." And then there's a little bit o... |
Also, at the time that we started revamping a lot of these docs, we introduced a new documentation type tutorial into our system, which exists in a lot of different documentation systems... But we spent a lot of time thinking about and working with a team of technical writers, about 20 of them, who were working across ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** The thing which I'm thinking about now is writing documentation and getting documentation out there, part of the same repository. I know that a lot of what we talked about is bigger teams, larger organizations... But if you're a smaller team - again, just a handful of engineers - and you're trying to ... |
**Kathy Korevec:** I mean, I think it depends on how you work. I think if it's useful for you to have it separate, then do that. If it's useful for you to have it in the code itself, then do that. I think, if you're just starting out, you're probably going to private beta or like ship something in public, but ask for a... |
The way that I would think about it, and this is one thing that I do when I'm just starting a new project, is that I think about my documentation like I would release notes. And when I get to the end of my day or whatever, I'm kind of thinking about like "Okay, what does this release look like for people? What are the ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** The reason why I ask this is because I can see a lot of things coming together in a single GitHub repository, and I think that in itself is a very powerful concept. Not only you have code, you have the readme, you have GitHub Actions in the same context... Though you don't leave your repository; it's ... |
**Kathy Korevec:** Yes, issues in PRs. |
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