PyCon UK 2022

Creating your first documentation site for your Python code
2022-09-16 , Room B

You have built an awesome API; time for some exposure! How do you keep a documentation website up-to-date as your code evolves? This workshop teaches you how to write, generate, host, automate and version your documentation easily so it becomes part of your software development life cycle.


Good API documentation is crucial to a new library’s popularity and its adoption by other developers.

In this workshop, you will learn how to build a documentation website for your Python code from scratch using Sphinx, a powerful documentation generation tool. Sphinx makes it easy to keep your API docs in sync with your code and you will put it in practice in a provided example project.

By the end of the session you will learn how to:

  • generate HTML documentation for your API
  • customise your website’s appearance
  • host your documentation online on GitHub Pages
  • version your docs to follow the releases of your code
  • use GitHub Actions to automate all the above as your new code updates are merged into your source

Prerequisites:

In order to attend this workshop you will need to bring a laptop with git and python installed (python3.10 is recommended), as well as a GitHub account.


Is your proposal suitable for beginners?: yes

Olga Matoula is a senior software engineer at Bloomberg, where she is creating a chatbot framework for Instant Bloomberg, the company's chat tool. Before that, she worked in different engineering teams at Bloomberg and Microsoft, and had previously co-founded Code It Like a Girl, an award-winning social enterprise where she taught women and children in Greece to code. Olga is a Python enthusiast and loves participating in tech community events. She also enjoys exploring London’s music and swing dancing scene.

Aya Elsayed is a software engineer at Bloomberg. She’s a leader in the company's Python Guild, which aims to support Python engineers at Bloomberg to innovate, develop Python packages, and stay connected to the broader Python community. Aya also co-leads a local Women in Tech community that supports women to grow their technical careers at the company.