5-Day Free Course · Writing

Technical Writing Docs Developers Actually Read

API documentation, READMEs, tutorials, conceptual guides, style guides, and docs-as-code with MkDocs or Docusaurus. The technical writing course for engineers who want their documentation to be useful, not just present.

5 days self-paced
Free forever
Text + external video refs
No signup required
tech-writing$vale --config .vale.ini docs/Readability: 92/100$mkdocs build --strict$
5
Days
30+
Code Examples
5+
External Videos
$0
Forever Free

No videos. On purpose.

This is a text-first course that links out to the best supporting material on the internet instead of trying to replace it. The goal is to make this the best course on technical writing you can find — even without producing a single minute of custom video.

Practitioner-tested, not vendor marketing

This course is built by engineers who ship technical writing systems in production. It reflects how these tools actually behave at scale.

Code you can run, not demos to watch

Every day includes working code examples you can copy, run, and modify right now. Understanding comes through doing.

Links to the canonical sources

Instead of re-explaining existing documentation, this course links to the definitive open-source implementations and the best reference material on technical writing available.

Completes in 5 one-hour sessions

Each day is designed for about an hour of focused reading plus hands-on work. Do the whole course over a week of lunch breaks. No live classes, no quizzes.

The 5 Days

Each day stands alone. Read them in order for the full picture, or jump straight to the day that answers the question you have today.

01Day One

Writing for Developers

The developer documentation mindset (task-oriented, code-first, minimal), the difference between reference, tutorial, how-to, and explanation (Diátaxis framework), information architecture, and the most common developer docs mistakes.

Diátaxisreference vs tutorialinformation architecturedeveloper docs
02Day Two

READMEs and Getting Started Guides

The anatomy of a great README (badges, installation, quickstart, configuration, contributing), writing a Getting Started that works for a new user with zero context, and the README antipatterns that make open-source repos unusable.

README structurequickstartbadgesgetting started
03Day Three

API Reference Documentation

Writing endpoint descriptions developers trust, request/response examples in multiple languages, error code documentation, OpenAPI spec as source of truth, and generating API docs from code comments with tools like Swagger and Mintlify.

OpenAPISwaggerMintlifyAPI reference
04Day Four

Tutorials and How-To Guides

The learning tutorial vs the task how-to — why conflating them fails readers. Writing tutorials that actually teach, step validation, expected output at each step, and the code example standards that make tutorials reproducible.

tutorial designstep validationhow-to guidescode examples
05Day Five

Docs-as-Code and Style Guides

MkDocs Material, Docusaurus, version-controlled docs, CI linting with Vale, the Google Developer Style Guide as a baseline, writing AI-assisted docs and maintaining quality, and building a documentation contribution workflow for engineering teams.

MkDocsDocusaurusValestyle guide

The best external videos on this topic.

Instead of shooting our own videos, we link to the best deep-dives already on YouTube. Watch them alongside the course. All external, all free, all from builders who ship this stuff.

Read the source.

The best way to deepen understanding is to read the canonical open-source implementations. Clone them, trace the code, understand how the concepts in this course get applied in production.

Three kinds of people read this.

Engineers Who Own Their Project's Documentation

You wrote the code. Now you need to document it. This course gives you the structure and tools to write documentation that saves your users' time instead of wasting it.

Developer Advocates and DevRel Teams

Great developer experience starts with great documentation. This course covers the documentation strategy and tooling that the best developer platforms use.

Technical Writers Learning Docs-as-Code

Modern developer documentation lives in Git and deploys with CI/CD. This course covers the tools and workflows that technical writers need to work alongside engineering teams.

Want to Go Deeper In Person?

The 2-day in-person Precision AI Academy bootcamp covers technical communication and documentation in depth — hands-on, with practitioners who build AI systems for a living. 5 U.S. cities. $1,490. 40 seats max. June–October 2026 (Thu–Fri).

Reserve Your Seat