Whether for internal use or for an open-source project, most programmers hate writing technical documentation. Not just dislike, hate. They hate it. And because they hate it, it usually isn't very good. It can be hard to follow and incomplete, which is irritating to experienced devs and causes panic attacks for newbies just trying to learn something. RTFM, or Read the F@$%& Manual, is an expression commonly thrown at people trying to learn some new coding language or technology, but how can they if nobody wants to WriteTFM?
But even if a developer or team wants to create good documentation, it will inevitably fall short because not everyone learns best through reading. Many people are visual learners, and even more learn best through the act of doing. Docs do nothing to engage those two groups of people.
As the creators of some of the world's most popular open-source projects that incorporate other technologies and integrate with dozens more, we've both felt the pain of combing through terrible documentation to try and learn something and the pain of writing comprehensive docs for our own projects. We believe technical documentation can be much better, so we set out to reinvent the very idea of what documentation is and how it could be done with the new Foundation docs.
The new Foundation docs was designed to help people learn through Reading, Seeing, and Doing:
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Videos demonstrating how to use each component - Each and every component has an easy to follow video walkthrough. -
Live demos to play with in real time - Quickly experiment with and edit components without having to setup a full install on your machine with our live CodePen demos. -
Easy to understand descriptions - We've rewritten all of the descriptions to be clearer and more concise than ever.
In addition to all of these new features, the interface has been streamlined to be easier to navigate and find what you need. It's technical documentation without the frustration, with easily digestible content for each of the three learning types. Welcome to the new Foundation Docs.
Combined with our recent Foundation Building Blocks release, we've made a huge investment in helping both veteran Foundation users and newbies better harness the power of Foundation!
