Focus

Documentation

Articles, podcasts, talks, and more about Documentation.
Blog Post

AI Features for Jira Data Center – No Atlassian Cloud Required

Imagine this: after every customer meeting, structured Jira issues are created automatically. You just paste your notes into an AI, and it does the rest. Atlassian already offers that kind of magic in Jira Cloud: natural-language search, automatic summaries, and issue creation from unstructured text. But not everyone wants to move to the cloud, and many teams plan to keep using Jira Data Center through 2029. In this article, we show how to get many of the same benefits on-premises with Jira Server and your own AI stack: GDPR-compliant, resilient to Cloud Act exposure, and without data leaving your environment.

Blog Post

Infrastructure in architectural documentation

Most people are familiar with the principles of good architecture documentation. However, the infrastructure often goes unnoticed or is only understood by a few “experts”. Especially with complex systems, it is important to record solution concepts and decisions at the infrastructure level of an application in order to be able to understand the architecture and further develop the software. This article is aimed at development teams that have difficulties integrating infrastructure topics into their documentation. It also offers insights for platform engineers and cross-functional teams who are responsible for their own infrastructure.

Blog Post

Concise Documentation – Revisited

The Architecture Communication Canvas

Blog Post

Draw The Diff

Software developers have an idiosyncratic penchant for boxes and arrows. Back when we used to go to the office we penned them on whiteboards. Later, as the force majeure accelerated the digital transformation of our economies, we drew them online.

Blog Post

Babylon as a Feature

The Tower of Babylon is a myth meant to explain why the world’s peoples speak different languages. In modern IT systems, it’s often a requirement to support multiple languages. Such internationalization (i18n for short) is a tough challenge – and this post describes a simple solution to just the tiny part of multilingual documents. Our solution combines the simplicity of the plain-text format AsciiDoc with a simple yet versatile build script to support multiple languages (like EN and DE) and multiple output formats (like PDF and HTML).

Blog Post

How AI will replace my job

I started using ChatGPT for my work. Here is what it taught me and what AI might hold for the future of software development and consulting

Blog Post

Rich code documentation with Jekyll

Static site generation is a perfect fit for publishing documentation. In a recent project, we chose to use a combination of Jekyll and NGINX to build and host the documentation. In this post, I show how to process and include other types of assets.

Blog Post

Customer-specific documentation with Jekyll

Static site generation is a perfect fit for publishing documentation. In a recent project, we chose to use Jekyll for rendering our content. As a special requirement, we had to build different “flavours” for different customers.

Blog Post

Principles of technical documentation
Blog Post

code-your-model

Some time ago I was looking for some simple, lightweight tool to document a complex, modularized model. I was not able to find anything that fits my requirements or expectations, so I came up with my own idea. Today, a good 15 months later, I want to introduce it to you.