datastax / streaming-learning-docs

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streaming-learning-docs

Writing a guide

A guide is a document offering step by step instruction to reach some goal. Guides are technical in nature and tend to make assumptions about the consumer’s environment. To help create guides that will work in most environments, please follow these ideas.

  • Keep links to a minimum - when someone is learning a new concept for the first time and every other word is linked it makes things confusing and hard to get a good flow going. Instead, annotate a word or phrase and provide a "Resources" area at the bottom of the guide.

  • Separate products and runtimes in tabs - it is common to reach the same result through multiple ways. An example is creating a tenant/namespace/topic in Astra Streaming and Luna Streaming. Both have the same result but get there in very different ways. Offer each as a tab and let the consumer choose their path. The step after the tabbed step can assume the consumer has complete the previious step and is in a known state. Runtimes follow the same pattern. Weather one is using Java or C#, they are still creating a Pulsar client to interact with the cluster. Create a single step in the guide with multiple tabs for each runtime.

  • Be thoughtful about the names you use - if you are leaning a new concept or feature with no background on the product, words matter. Labeling a tab as "Luna Helm" and then referring to it as "Pulsar Helm Chart" are two distinct things to that reader. The author of the document has such deep understanding that they consider those things the same - and technically they are at DataStax. But the read isn’t from DataStax, so be mindful of their context.

  • Talk in first person - humans create the guides and humans consume the guides. Write as if you are paired with your consumer in doing what ever the guide does. Use "we", "us", "you".

Starter example

Create a new .adoc file in the appropriate module and use the example-guide.adoc file as a starting point to creating a new guide.

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