The Best Docs Sites

I think a lot about what makes a docs site great. It's easy to talk about the sites that look great, but looking snazzy and having flashy interactive components doesn’t mean much if the docs don’t answer your questions when you’re trying to fix an issue.

I know which docs I think are great among the sites I use most often – Docker, Netlify / Gatsby Cloud, AWS, GitHub, MDN, MongoDB – and I know which of those I like less. I'm just one person, though, and I wanted to know what docs other folks use that they think are great, so I asked on LinkedIn.

The clear winner from my totally unscientific poll was MDN, whose CSS, HTML, and JavaScript reference is truly excellent. I'm going to dig into why I think MDN is so great (and highlight some novel choices made by their team) soon.

Aside from MDN, some of the responses surprised me, some were brand new to me, a few I suspect were folks upvoting their friends’ startups 😀, and some were old favourites. Over the next few weeks I’m planning to look at some of the sites and talk about what I think makes those sites good and suggest some areas of improvement. I’m looking forward to digging into some new tools and technologies as I present a better model of what makes a great docs site great.

Here's the list, well categorized. ^[1]

Great Docs Here

Programming Languages / Frameworks

• Golang's package reference
• PHP
• Python (specifically the concurrent.futures docs)
• Rust and its mysterious interactive experimental version
• Symfony
• TypeScript
• vue.js

Databases

• Firebase
• MySQL (it took me an unreasonable amount of time to find the correct link from MySQL.com’s documentation landing page, since they’re clearly trying REALLY HARD to make MySQL HeatWave a thing. I am unimpressed.)
• Postgres

Tooling

• Ansible
• Material for MkDocs
• nunjucks
• Scikit-learn
• Terraform

Product Docs

• Ayden
• Cloudinary
• Flagright
• Flatfile
• GitHub
• Infisical
• Loops
• Skyflow
• Stream