Your README is Your Documentation Landing Page

By Lorna Jane Mitchell

Elevator Pitch

You can write the best, most structured documentation in the world - and your users will still arrive by some other route. This session focuses on the GitHub repos that your documentation references, and how to prepare for these to be the entry point for someone.

Description

Having a good README file in every GitHub project is a key ingredient of good developer experience, but what makes a good README? This session looks at the various types of projects you might want to create a README for, and offers examples of good README practice in each case. Making sure the purpose and status of the project is key, and directing users to your (beautiful and actively maintained) main documentation is definitely part of the deal. But we can do more to engage and inform developers that reach our projects this way, and this session will show you how. Recommended for everyone who wants to make the projects we create a welcoming place for users, however they find us.

Notes

Revisiting and curating our libraries and other sample code repos is a key part of my job at Nexmo. The README is such a specific format but I would love more technical writers to feel empowered to go forth and create really well-written READMEs - this session should give them a good start and we can all change the world, one README at a time :)