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Steps
1
Introduction
2
Why Walkthrough?
3
Basic Components
4
Code Writing
5
Explaining better
6
Images and Videos
7
Links and Actions
8
Attachments
9
Macros
10
Conclusion

Overview

This is a demo walkthrough to showcase the capabilities of Walkthrough. But before we go, we want to briefly talk about why we need walkthrough in first place.

Product Motivation

For last 5+ years, I worked as a platform engineer at Uber. During this period, Uber was in its rocket ship phase. To put in numbers, I joined as ~3000th employee in 2015 and there were 26000+ employees when I left.
As a platform engineer, I was responsible for building the core logistic platform on which every trip for every business line of Uber happened. We were a small team of ~50+ engineers owning over 100+ key integration points across 10s of microservices. We were supporting 2000+ internal engineers to use our platform. We used all different tools - wikis, docs, API docs etc. To scale better, we wrote tutorials, playbooks, how-tos, guides, runbooks etc. (called practical documentation).
But even with that “onboarding customers at speed” kind of remained a big challenge. So about a year back, I started building this product.

Top  5 Challenges with Practical Documentation

Most tech platform companies rely on - how-to guides/tutorials/runbooks (a.k.a practical documentation) to write down operational procedures for themselves and their customers. But such documentation often lacks in quality and leads to organisation wide chaos. 
  • Difficult to write 
    Most writing tools - word, doc, markdowns don't have capabilities for such technical writing. They don't support even basic things like writing code snippets, magnifying screenshots, embedding content from Github etc. Other tools like wiki look to unattractive for sharing with external audience.
  • Difficult to share and discover
    Sharing discoverability are very essential for such documentation. But most tools lack support for private sharing across organizations. Also for public sharing, they have minimal or no Search Engine Optimisation. 
  • Hard to keep up to date
    Poor quality writing tools and missing workflow in in above mentioned tools leads to poor and outdated documentation. The documentation is often static and repetitive. 
  • No metrics
    Most writing tools do not have detailed insights into how and when your documentation is used. This also leads to loss of motivation for writers to come back and keep documentation updated.
  • Writing quality
    Technical documentation can only scale and remain upto date if it is owned and maintained by engineering teams. But technical writing is hard.  Inconsistent writing practices, structure leads to read confusion. 
And there are plenty more. 
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