Posted in 2013

2013 Year in Review

  • Dec 31 2013

2013 has been a fantastic year. In 2012, I decided that I would focus more on life than my career. This year has been a larger experiment along those lines. I have done a lot of good work on programming, but I have also taken a lot of time to spend for myself.

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Read the Docs 2013 Stats

  • Dec 23 2013

2013 has been a big year for Read the Docs. Our mission is to make documentation hosting easier, with the overall goal of increasing the quality of documentation in the programming world. I believe that we have been doing good work towards that goal, and I want to share some numbers to reflect our progress.

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A Better Javascript Workflow with Django

  • Nov 21 2013

Javascript has always been the bane of my existence as a developer. It was the part of the process of developing that I would dread. On the last project I worked on, I found a very simple change that significantly improved my experience writing Javascript.

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Codes of Conduct, an Organizers Perspective

  • Nov 11 2013

I helped organize my first conference last year, Write the Docs. It was a great experience, but was also rather stressful. Organizing things is an interesting exercise in managing fear and risk. There are so many possible outcomes, and this is scary as hell.

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A New Theme for Read the Docs

  • Nov 04 2013

We have been hard at work improving Read the Docs over the past month. A large amount of back end work has been going on, and now we have a brand new documentation theme to showcase it.

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Google Summer of Code Book Sprint 2013

  • Oct 24 2013

Or how I learned to stop worrying and write a book.

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Announcing Grok the Docs

  • Oct 08 2013

I’ve asked myself these questions a lot. Historically I have put Google Analytics on my doc pages, and called it good. I would browse over the data every once in a while, gleaning basically zero information out of it.

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Sphinx Live Preview

  • Oct 01 2013

For a long time, there has been a live preview site for reStructuredText: http://rst.ninjs.org/. It is really fantastic for learning the language. The immediate feedback is really valuable in helping you expirment and see how things work.

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Writing a Beginners Guide to Documentation

  • Sep 30 2013

A few days ago I started a campaign to improve documentation. Today I have the first results to show from this work.

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A letter to an old friend

  • Sep 28 2013

A letter I wrote to an old friend Josh, after I had come home from the PCT. It was sent on August 7th, 2013. It captures my thoughts on the trail pretty well.

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Help me improve documentation

  • Sep 25 2013

tl;dr: I don’t have (or want) a job, help fund me to make the documentation world better.

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Prepping for the Pacific Crest Trail

  • Apr 04 2013

My time in Portland in winding down, and the trail is approaching in my minds eye. I leave on the 14th of April, and 6 in the morning. Setting out on a jet-plane to San Diego. I will spend the night on the 14th and be transported to the trailhead at sunrise the following day.

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Announcing Write the Docs

  • Jan 28 2013

Documentation is one of the most important parts of a software project. However, a lot of projects have little or no documentation to help their (potential) users use the software. A few years ago we started Read the Docs to help make hosting documentation easier. Part of the reason was that if hosting documentation was a solved problem, it would make people more likely to write docs.

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A Walk in the Woods

  • Jan 10 2013

I’ve recently schemed some very large changes in my life, and I have been trying to figure out how to blog about it. It all starts with quitting my job at Urban Airship. I sent an email to the staff announcing my departure, and I can’t think of a better way to remember this moment in time than to include it in full in my blog. So, here is the letter I wrote to everyone at work when I left the company.

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Hey there! I'm Eric and I work on communities in the world of software documentation. Feel free to email me if you have comments on this post!