Creative Documentation

FuriousCurio writes "Linux kernel hackers appear to be an endlessly creative group of individuals. In response to previous documentation attempts not having been read by many people, KernelTrap is reporting about how the lguest documentation was prepared to be something of an adventure story. Self-proclaimed to turn you into an lguest expert, lguest being one of the new solutions for running a virtual instance of the Linux operating system as a user process within a real instance of the Linux operating system, the documentation mixes humor and wit into puzzles, poetry, and of course source code and a low-level understanding of virtualization. But the questions remains, will making documentation more entertaining actually work to get people to read it?"

Re:Yes....

[richie2000]

many of the problems with technological documentation could be solved by just keeping me in the loop throughout the project

I have on occasion had to more or less forcibly inject myself into projects just to be in the loop. I have also threatened the entire development staff with a baseball bat or simply coming around and sit on them (I'm fairly big) if they didn't give me useful data. It worked so-so - getting on the projects worked better, even though it took a lot of time from writing. It probably helped that I'm trained as a programmer originally and could actually contribute a little bit to the projects.