Technical documentation often gets a bad rap for being hard to navigate, overly dense, or just plain boring. But when done right, it becomes a powerful part of your product—accelerating adoption, reducing support overhead, and making developers genuinely love working with your tools.

In this post, I’ll walk you through the essential components of great software documentation and share best practices for writing tutorials that resonate with developers.

What Does Good Technical Documentation Include?

At its core, good software documentation should do more than just explain things—it should guide, inspire, and simplify the learning journey. Here are the foundational elements:

1. Overview or Landing Page

Avoid the common trap of forcing every developer through all your docs just to reach what they need. Let them jump directly to their destination—whether that’s an API, SDK setup, or feature-specific guide.

2. Quickstart

This is the gateway to your product. A good quickstart helps developers see real value fast. It should cover:

• Requirements
• Environment setup
• Installation steps
• A meaningful example

Don’t just print “Hello, World.” Instead, show a real use case that demonstrates the potential of your tool.

3. Key Concepts

Even familiar terms can have unfamiliar meanings in your product. That’s where a Key Concepts section helps.

Take mintBlue, for example. It uses “projects” in a unique way—as containers for transactions, where the same transaction can belong to multiple projects. A simple screenshot plus a short explanation here makes a big difference.

Clarify terminology up front and eliminate guesswork.

4. What’s New

A “What’s New” section isn’t just for show—it builds trust.

It signals that your product is actively maintained and helps developers stay up to date without scouring release notes or mailing lists. Use practical code examples to show changes in action, rather than just listing version numbers or bug fixes.

5. Example Applications

Nothing beats hands-on experience.

Provide downloadable, runnable example apps that developers can tweak and learn from. Think framework-specific examples (e.g., React, Angular), or backend samples in Python, Node.js, or Go.

Want to go further? Add small challenges to your example apps—prompt developers to modify code to achieve certain goals. It’s an interactive way to reinforce learning.

What Makes a Great Tutorial

Good tutorials aren’t just instructional—they’re empowering. They guide developers from confusion to clarity, frustration to confidence.

Here’s how to structure tutorials that actually help:

1. Overview

Begin with context. What will this tutorial teach? Why should someone follow it? A short overview helps developers decide if it’s the right guide for them.

2. Prerequisites

Few things are more frustrating than starting a tutorial, only to hit a wall because you’re missing dependencies.

List all requirements clearly at the beginning: software versions, environment variables, or third-party accounts/tools they might need.

3. Summary (What Did You Learn?)

End with a summary of key takeaways. Reinforcing the main lessons improves retention and lets developers confirm what they’ve achieved.

4. What’s Next

Once developers finish your tutorial, keep their momentum going.

Suggest logical next steps—whether that’s another tutorial, API reference, or a real-world use case. Good docs help devs take the next step with confidence.

Why Information Architecture Matters

Solid documentation structure—also known as information architecture—is the invisible hero behind great developer experience.

A good structure helps users intuitively navigate to the right content, without needing to guess or search too much.

Two Approaches That Work Well:

• Cello.so

Cello’s docs offer a smooth, linear progression. They start with an introduction, move through quickstarts and SDK usage, then transition into in-depth reference material.

• mintBlue

mintBlue structures documentation around features. Each feature has a dedicated “mini-doc” with its own quickstart, key concepts, tutorials, and how-to guides. This modular approach makes it easy to find relevant content without bouncing around.

Interestingly, Transactions section starts with hands-on onboarding before diving into the underlying concepts. This helps developers understand functionality first, which makes the deeper technical context more meaningful.

Documentation Examples to Learn Fro

Here are a few standout examples of documentation done right:

• Vault – A clean, well-organized landing page that helps you get started with any feature quickly.
• Cello.so – Elegant structure and one of the best “What’s New” sections around.
• Stripe – Arguably the gold standard in interactive developer documentation. Their API reference, code snippets, and live demos are next-level.

Final Thoughts

Great technical documentation isn’t just about information—it’s about experience. When your docs are intuitive, purposeful, and developer-first, they become a powerful part of your product.

Whether you’re building a new API, SDK, or full-blown platform, investing in high-quality documentation is one of the best ways to earn developer trust—and love.

P.S. Many of the examples in this post come from documentation I’ve personally written and shaped with these best practices in mind. I hope this guide helps you do the same.

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