Empower Your Business with Open Source Contact Management Software in IT Architecture Documentation

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do you know that you're working on a new exciting project you do your technical research and set up everything and it's working fine but after some weeks or months you need to recap that or need to change something and you just try to remember well what the hell did i do there i better written that down somewhere so to be honest with you most people including myself don't like to write technical documentation because it sometimes seems boring or just distracts you from just getting things done but believe me it's much more important to write technical documentation than you probably might think now so let me explain why that is and also come up with some great tips how to write good technical documentation and i also will show you the software and tools i personally used so if you want to know all that keep watching hi everybody my name is christian and welcome to the digital life the right place for you to start your it career achieve new skills and learn how to become a real i.t professional so i always do great videos and tutorials where i talk about topics that will help you to accelerate your it career and also technologies that matter to enterprise companies i always do live streaming on youtube and twitch where you can just come around and ask me any questions so if that sounds amazing to you don't forget to subscribe to my channel in this video we want to talk about technical documentation and i know that probably sounds boring to some of you guys but trust me it is much more interesting and important than you probably might think now so let me explain and we first want to discuss why do we write technical documentation so why should you do that so a technical documentation is to document any product or project related information so that can be for project that is still in development or also already in production so just think of any api documentation network documentation or instruction manuals user guides anything like this so most people think that technical documentation is just a dry text that is complicated and only i.t specialists with relevant education can read and understand but that is actually not true a good technical documentation is written in simple language and we use a lot of visual elements to make that excitingly so for example we use infographics network diagrams we use videos in some cases because nobody really wants to read a long and complicated text and it really doesn't help anybody so especially when you work in a company and you work in a small or medium-sized team it is absolutely necessary to have a good technical documentation but also if you're just working for yourself you work on your private home lab or you want to do a technical research study for your it certifications and so on you should always document your process because trust me you won't remember everything you did a few weeks or months ago so no matter if you just want to recap that later or if you want to share that information with somebody else it really helps you to document everything and i just can encourage you to build up your own knowledge base to document what you learn along your id career because you can also share this to anybody else you can show up that in your resume if you have a good documentation that helps you a lot and i personally i don't enjoy so much the process of writing technical documentation but i know that it's absolutely necessary to help me understand certain topics or to just share that information with you on youtube or anywhere else so it really is much much more important than you probably might think now let me also come up with some tips how to write good technical documentation because i know that is not so easy so if you want to do that you are writing technical documentation you always should start with outline your topics and structure and always think of the readers first so who is the reader who are you writing to what language should you use and also think of topics and structure that is interesting to the reader so whenever somebody reads your documentation he wants to achieve a goal so that goal can be use a specific product or understand a topic or recap a project and only write things down that will help the reader to achieve that goal because a good technical documentation is written simple excitingly and don't use any long and complicated information so that also leads me to the next tip use simple language so don't use any long and complicated texts try to avoid any complicated words because you want to sound like an expert or something like this so that really doesn't help anybody to understand the text and the content so that is really important also use diagrams graphics and videos to illustrate a complex topic whenever it makes sense sometimes it's simpler to understand complex topics with a simple graphic or an architectural diagram that will help the reader to understand those complex workflows or complex topics so it also makes your writing or your documentation much more excitingly if you use some graphics and texts so it makes it more attractive and easy to understand as well also always use examples especially when you work a lot with commands or instructions so that will really help you to recap that later and the reader can better understand how to use that command it also avoids anybody from applying those commands wrongly so that is very very important let me also show you what software and tools i personally use to write my technical documentation because if you want to embed any links graphics or videos the software needs to be capable of doing those things so that is really really important also if you're working in teams or in any company so that is really important to share this technical documentation with anybody else so so if you're just writing technical documentation for yourself so for example you want to document your home lab network diagram or you just want to study for your it certifications and write down something you probably can use anything you want so whenever you're using a simple text editor like notepad notepad plus plus or anything like visual studio code as i said those simple editors don't have the ability to embed any links videos or something like this but most people just use those simple things to write down something and that's just okay if that works for you it's fine don't forget to backup your software so you can use whatever you like like a usb drive external hard drive i personally i prefer to upload everything to the cloud also some people use version control systems like git to document anything so that is also commonly used so there are thousands of tools available and i think whatever works for you personally is just fine but i want to show you a different method i personally use to write my technical documentation so i want to show you a specific tool or software that is automatically backed up in the cloud and that is also used by enterprise companies so many big enterprise companies use tools and software from atlassian such as confluence or jira so that is the documentation software and jira is a bug tracking software that is often used in software development and those enterprise tools offer some amazing features like they have some great templates they have some great integrations with other software and diagrams so that is really really powerful it probably may seem like a complete overkill to you to use any of these enterprise software but think of it it is an advantage to familiarize yourself with these enterprise tools in software because if you work in any kind of company like an enterprise company and you need to document any technical things there it is very likely that this company will use tools from atlassian corp like confluence or jira and it really helps your it career if you understand how these tools are working and if you familiarize yourself with this software and if you learn how to write good technical documentation so that is really valuable for your it career as well if you're not wondering how could you use those amazing enterprise tools in the cloud just as an individual private person well this is really easy because they offer it for free up to 10 users of course there are some limitations when it comes to integration with other tools and software but you can just use the whole system and the amazing documentation features just for free as i said this software is often used in very big environments think of companies that have over thousands of employees so this is a very reliable system and this is the reason why it is so commonly used if you want to use that software just go to the homepage atlassian.com i've put your link in the description below just go to products and select confluence so this is a collaboration software where you can write good technical documentation and then you can just click on get it free now you can also select if you want to use jira or jira service desk so that could be interesting for any kind of development processes like software development where you just want to track bugs or features you want to implement but if you don't want to use that just click on next you can see it supports up to 10 users of read agents includes 2 gigabytes of storage has a free community support and it's always free no credit card needed so that sounds amazing just click on next and now you can sign up with your personal email address or just use your google account i will do that now we need to enter a site name so that can be something familiar to your team or company so i will just choose the digital life then just click on continue and your personal space is creating you can also add other people to your team but i don't want to do that right now i just click on next and now we need to create a space so in confluence everything is organized in spaces and you can use a team or project or anything you're just working on for example just create a space for certifications because i want to document my process when i work on it certifications just click on next so now we will start with a simple page there are some interesting tutorials here but i will just um close this so that will teach you how to work with the software if you are new to confluence i strongly recommend you to use that but i will just create an example page for example i just want to create a learning path you can just enter any text here so you can write any text and you can also add some interesting things like you have an editor here where you can just change the basic things here you can add lists you can also add tables here for example if you want to create like an excel sheet or something like this you can embed any files and images links you can also add action items you can also tag other persons here and you can also add some interesting features with the plus here so you can add some calendars you can add some connections to the jira system quote something add status and you can also view more there are some interesting macros you can use to make more use of that system so but that would be too much to show you in this short tutorial i just want to show you what is possible with this system if i now click on publish a new page is now created let me also show you some of the amazing features confluence has because if you create a new page you can of course always start with a blank page and create your technical documentation your own but you can also use some of the good templates they have and there are a lot of useful templates for architectural design business processes workflows how-to tutorials user manuals and so on so just browse through that list and you can find some really good examples here let me show you one example that i think is very useful for example the aws architecture diagram so where you can define and describe complex cloud environments and you can see this template is now created we have a lot of predefined fields where we can just add and change information we also have a basic structure with goals architecture architecture flow deployment strategy rest api details with a nice code block slas and action items so you can also add some action items tag your name and you create basically your own to-do list where you can refer to in other pages and you can get a list of all actions that are open with a due date and so on so that is very useful you can also combine this with other adolescent products for example jira which is a bug tracking system and you can take jira tickets here where you can just click on a link and that will redirect you to the jira ticket portal so that is very useful of course you can also add other people to that page adjust the permissions for read and write for specific users and groups so this is a very powerful tool and this is why i absolutely love it and why i always use it to write my technical documentation so as you have seen that is a very powerful software i can strongly recommend to you because i use it to document any kind of process or project i'm working on and i use that also in the company i'm working for so that is very very powerful it probably requires you um some time to learn how to work with that system but it's really not that much difficult and if you're working in a company that uses this software you can get up to speed really fast because you know how to work with that and how to write good technical documentation so please give me feedback about this if this was interesting if you want to see more of that content and also leave me a comment what software do you use to write your technical documentation and if you could get some interesting ideas about that also don't forget to hit the like button if you enjoyed that and if you could learn something important so that will really help me to understand what kind of content you are interested in before i go i want to thank all of my supporters on patreon especially mason who is a producer of this show without you the community this whole project wouldn't be possible at all so thanks everybody for watching enjoy the rest of your day take care of yourself and i see you soon