[DeborahWrites]

Most guides to docs like code, even the ones for non-devs, assume you have some developer knowledge: maybe you're already using version control, or you've encountered build pipelines before, or you're working alongside developers.

This guide is for the people who read that paragraph and wished it came with a glossary. This is docs like code for people who don't know what git is and have never installed VS Code.

[dcminter]

This seems well intentioned, but ... have you actually put this in front of a non-programmer and got them to try to create documentation using it? I suspect it's got more speedbumps left in it than you think.

[DeborahWrites]

Very valid question. I have tested it a little! I wrote it because a less technical tech writer was asking me a ton of questions, and he found it helpful. I also got a non-technical marketing person to review it, and she said she was able to learn a lot from it (those are the two people I thank in the intro)

It's obviously not going to get someone up and running: it's not a hands-on practical guide. But there are already quite a lot of those out there (for instance, most static site generators have acceptable getting started docs) The aim is to provide the missing conceptual info that's usually assumed by the creators of tools, but that not all tech writers have. Ideally, it should make them feel more comfortable following, say, an intro to git tutorial, because they have a bit more context/explanation backing them up.

[bonzini]

In the early 2000s I was working in a webdev team where editors worked on the raw HTML (some with the help of Macromedia Dreamweaver, some simply with Notepad++) and pushed it to the httpd root via SFTP[1].

None of them had a developer background, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to do the same with Markdown and a pull request instead.

[1] Nope, no version control :) though there were three separate domains for unstable/test/prod (test/prod shared the database too, unstable didn't).