Plenty of people have put together systems to collect, judge, and evaluate open-source projects, including information about a project’s popularity, reliability, and activity. But they all have flaws.  Take that oldest of metrics: Lines of code (LoC). Yes, it’s easy to measure.

A lifelong bookworm and a fantasy geek, Sarah Chaffee had for years admired Dungeons & Dragons from afar. “In the culture I grew up in,” she says, “it was very much like, ‘D&D is devil worship.

I’ll give you an analogy of what Populous is in my mind. Imagine if I had a blank canvas. Some people that are true artists will take a palette of paint and mix them together and carefully handcraft each and every single brushstroke until they have some beautiful and amazing picture.

Game Masters who design their own stories are always looking for new sources of inspiration. A reasonable strategy is to lift something from an already existing fantasy story (or story in the genre your game is in) and file the serial numbers off.

In this episode, Juan Lara from Google joins us for a lively discussion about documentation templates. Documentation templates refer to established patterns we follow for common documentation types, such as quickstarts, how-to guides, concepts, tutorials, reference, troubleshooting, release notes, FAQs, or other information types that have similar, predictable patterns. Templates can be helpful in orienting new writers, but they can also help ensure consistency among larger groups of experienced writers too. Our discussion in this episode ranges from observations about when templates are right for users versus writers, and how templates fit into an overall content strategy and information architecture. Beyond templates, your user’s goals and journeys will influence the shape of your help content.