C301: UX for Docs: Documentation Engineering at Rubin

Theme: User Experience for astronomical software

pretalx

At Rubin Data Management we set out early in Construction to create a healthy documentation culture. In order to provide a good UX for documentation contributors, we developed a documentation infrastructure (now also used by the NASA SphereX project) that values low-friction documentation creation and guaranteed-accurate documentation techniques. By using development tools such as Github Actions, Slack bots and Jupyter Notebooks, we are battling successfully the traditional view of documentation as the chore of last resort for both writers and readers.