Just Simply
Emma Barnes • June 01, 2020 • online

Emma wants to explain how trivial your work is, nowadays. After all, there are so many gems, libraries and frameworks that make your work as developers painfully simple, really obvious and frighteningly easy. All you have to do is just use them: they make programming painless!

Except she won’t. Expanding on her justsimply.dev manifesto, Emma will share some of the most egregious examples of technical documentation that infuriate rather than help. And she’ll provide useful advice to keep your technical writing friendly, supportive and impactful.

And yes. All the phrases in the first paragraph are from real world documentation. By the end of this talk you’ll have resolved not to put people off using the code you’ve worked so hard to create. Because if someone’s having to read your docs, it’s not “simple”.

Book publisher turned programmer. She runs generalproducts.co, makers of Consonance, as well as indie publisher Snowbooks, and she maintains schools publishing app Make Our Book on Side Project Fridays. She works in a first floor office in a market town in the Oxfordshire countryside, which attracts a local cat that visits through the window.

Brighton Ruby 2020