I am spending more time in writing technical documentation. Is it bad?
I am working on a CLI framework, which enables the users to run commands in a user friendly way from GUI (web, mobile and desktop). As a programmer, I spend considerable shorter time than writing documentation for that product. Being a non-native english speaker, it took me around ~3 months to complete that.
Generally, I don't want to have the documentation in a traditional way, but more like a friendly interactive manner. Am I wrong ?
Looking for a feedback, which helps me for my next project. I really appreciate any comments on this.
As one who reads most documentation cover-to-cover, I really appreciate it.
and documentation is a value-add and competitive advantage! +1
Absolutely. For example, when evaluating a complex product documentation can make a difference to understand what it can do.
+1 forever!
I would echo that good documentation is invaluable. Your users will really appreciated it. Personally, I evaluate the documentation for software or a CLI tool to help determine if I want to use that software.
Keep investing time in your documentation. It will help you build better software and it will help your users be more successful with your software.
It's not perfectly clear what exactly your spending time on
Generically for such a product spending more times on doc than on the project makes sense.
Hopefully your using a good doc tool and not spending much time on the infrastructure for the docs
If it's the English that's taking time, the question is if you ok with this being more of an investment in yourself for the language skills, as if it's efficiency for the project you might better outsource it
Or try as much to be a technical example based docs that would save you a lot of content
I don't understand why are you writing documentation. Also documentation is a hugely broad term, documentation for what for whom for what purpose.
Nothing in software should take more than 2 weeks or else something is really wrong. However since this was posted on April 1st, I'll assume this is joke. That's a good one.
Cheers!
Anything you can do to make an onboarding curve easier will benefit your framework a lot. That being said, I think 3 months for technical docs is too much, especially, if the framework not yet established. If you haven't done so, go find some other programmers who would use it and ask for their feedback. Once you have a couple of die-hard fans, make the documentation easier for the masses.
Good luck!
Thanks for your feedback @sergey_shvets Points noted.