Embracing a Docs-as-Code approach

Summary

Engineers at Grab faced difficulties finding and writing technical documentation because materials were fragmented across various platforms and disconnected from daily workflows. To establish a single source of truth, the organisation adopted a Docs-as-Code approach starting in 2021. Under this system, documentation is written in plaintext Markdown within dedicated folders inside each service's Git repository. An internal developer portal automatically builds and publishes documentation whenever updates are committed, integrating documentation maintenance into the standard code development and review workflow. By April 2022, approximately 80% of Grab services were projected to host their documentation on the internal portal, with the model also expanding to technical training content.

Context

Grab engineers faced challenges discovering and writing technical documentation because content was scattered across different platforms like Google Drive documents and text files, separating documentation from regular development workflows and causing content to become outdated.

Approach / What changed

Grab implemented a Docs-as-Code system by storing Markdown documentation in dedicated docs folders within Git repositories and building an internal developer portal that automatically builds and publishes the latest documentation.

Takeaways

• Placing documentation in the same Git repository as source code allows teams to manage documentation updates through standard version control and code review processes.
• Grab's internal developer portal connects to service repositories to automatically build and publish documentation pushed to dedicated Markdown folders.
• The Docs-as-Code framework was projected to cover approximately 80% of Grab services by April 2022 and is also being applied to self-paced and workshop training content.

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