Engineering the docs at LSST

Documentation plays a quiet, but critical, role in our field. Sooner or later, all of us have to write docs, whether we want to or not, and whether we have formal training or not. Docs always seem to take longer to make, and are harder to maintain, than we expect. In this talk, I will walk through several case studies of how we approach documentation production at the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope from my perspective as the documentation engineer for the Data Management subsystem. I'll show how we democratized information sharing with our Developer Guide and technical notes platform; how a Slack bot and templates make everyone on the team work like professional documentarians; how implementing continuous delivery for documentation stopped endless email chains of PDF and Word files; and even how we're helping the commissioning team communicate their investigations through Jupyter notebooks. I'll talk candidly about both the benefits and costs of our engineering-forward approach to LSST documentation and hopefully, will inspire you to take a fresh look at writing the docs for your own projects.