Any type of documentation under the sun requires someone to write it, and its limitations often correlate to the author’s writing ability just as much as their domain expertise.
Swimm has created a new bank of templates to help you become better writers, and inspire you with suggestions about what exactly to write to make you better documentarians. This way, you can overcome “writer’s block” easily and gain the confidence to know that documentation does take just a few minutes.
Swimm templates are written by our R&D, Engineering & DevRel teams, as well as Swimm’s greater community.
To help you bang out documentation, let’s jump straight to how Swimm templates will help you jump aboard the Continuous Documentation train.
Introducing Swimm’s code documentation templates
Swimm’s code documentation templates provide accessible examples of typical documentation tasks such as:
- Setting up local build environments
- Documenting a new class, interface, or other kinds of shared library
- Creating structured offboarding to help stop knowledge leaks and numerous other archetypes pulled right from common day-to-day tasks
To use Swimm’s code documentation templates, first create a new document and select a template from Swimm’s template collection. Note that Swimm is always developing new templates, so the number of template options will continue to grow.
After you select a code documentation template, you’ll see that the default text is there to not just prompt you with what to write but gives you an easy-to-read example of text developed by our communications team to help you write clearly and succinctly. With Swimm code documentation templates, you simply edit the document with your own explanation of the code while it’s fresh and clear in your mind.
Once you’re happy with your draft, you can open a PR to create the doc (or commit it directly to any selected unprotected branch).
Bottom line
If you’re looking for an easy way to get started with documentation, Swimm code documentation templates give you that quick access to writing your first doc. So, for example, if you know what should be written, but you simply aren’t all that keen on writing, you can open up a template and literally just start writing your notes – knowing that it’s going to help the rest of your team understand the code you’ve written.
Others with a great facility to write and less averse to documentation will also find Swimm’s code documentation templates convenient to help show the immediate wins of documentation, bringing others onboard to the major benefits of Continuous Documentation.
R&D teams, developers, engineers – if you are interested in learning more about how to keep your dev team in sync with code, this is as good a time as any to learn what Swimm is all about. With Swimm, you can create and edit docs that are coupled with your code, Auto-synced, and fully integrated into your workflow.
Take a look around Swimm and sign up for a 1:1 demo – it’s a game changer for code documentation.
