Learn how scientists document their work and are able to pick up new experimental protocols quickly. Apply the concepts of scientific protocols to your documentation to make them more useful to yourself and your users.

Working in the “S” part of STEM has taught me a lot of applicable practices to apply to tech. From thinking about distributed systems as cell signaling pathways to troubleshooting deployment problems on variable at a time to writing and expecting high fidelity documentation. Learning some of these thought patterns took years to develop, but implementing high fidelity documentation is possible by following a few best practices from science.

In this talk, I’ll discuss standard aspects of scientific documentation that allows scientists to pick up new experiment protocols with over 100 steps and execute them flawlessly. We’ll dive into the purpose of each piece of scientific documentation and how that translates to a better experience with technical documentation. These features don’t require writing more, but thinking about how the features of the documentation help not only the user but also the writer of the documentation.