Reading Technical Writing

Estimated Time: 1.5 hours

As you develop your technical skills and launch your career, you will be required to read a variety of documents that are specific to the technology industry. In this section we will dive into discussing a couple of these types of documents, and explore some tips for how to approach reading them effectively. We will cover:

  • Design Docs
  • Product Requirements Documents
  • Technical Documentation
  • Code
  • Technical Research Papers

Design Docs

📺 Watch the following video of Nabila, one of the Kibo mentors, describing what a design doc is.

📖 Read the following article about design docs at Google.

Product Requirements Documents

📺 Watch the following video to learn more about product requirements documents

📖 Here is an example of a PRD for Product Hunt.

Technical Documentation

📺 Watch the following video on how to read technical documentation.

Code

📺 Watch this video that delves deeper into how to read code. This is especially useful for reading and debugging your own code. (Note: This video is long, but I highly encourage you to watch it from timestamp 03:20 - 37:30)

Here is a summary of the three types of confusion when reading code that are mentioned in the video, along with the proposed solutions:

  1. Long-term memory issues - these occur when you encounter concepts, variable names, syntax, etc. that you are not familiar with.

    • Solution: STOP, look up the thing that you don’t know, practice retrieving the information.

  2. Short-term memory issues - these occur when you don't have the required prior knowledge available in your short-term memory.

    • Solution: Restructure the code so that it more closely matches your prior knowledge.

  3. Working memory issues - these occur when the amount of information that you need to juggle at a given time to understand something overloads the capacity of your working memory.

    • Solution: Support your working memory by using visuals like tables, or create a process that helps you decompose and step through different parts of the code (e.g. printing intermediary values to understand how the code is functioning).

📖 Read this article to learn how to read code written by someone else.

Technical Research Papers

📖 Read the following 2019 blog post by Robb on how to read research papers