Olivier Carrère · Senior Technical Writer: Technical writing practice
A documentation portfolio and library: methods, case studies, worked examples, and documentation projects, in English and French, maintained in Git since 2014.
Docs-as-code · DITA & structured authoring · Documentation architecture · Developer & API documentation · Automation & CI/CD
Available for a new opportunity from October 2026
Guided reading
Six paths through the manual
Read them in order for a complete method, or go straight to the path you need.
Understand documentation
Why documentation architecture matters: value, maturity, information types.
Build a documentation process
The workflow step by step, from project definition to delivery.
Adopt docs-as-code
Git, repository design, branches, CI/CD, and automated checks.
Choose an authoring model
Structured authoring, DITA, Markdown, content reuse, and formats.
Build your toolkit
Templates, checklists, and worked examples to reuse.
Automation & legacy techniques
Jinja, Python, sed, Sphinx/ReST, XSL-FO: specialist and historical techniques.
Selected work
Case studies and projects
Software product documentation in DITA XML, cited by the press as a strength of the product.
Bilingual documentation maintained in Git since 2014 and built by CI on every change.
The same sources served to scripts and AI agents as llms.txt, Markdown, and JSON.
Expertise
Areas of expertise
Each area links to the articles, case studies, and worked examples that demonstrate it.
Documentation in Git next to the product: branches, pull-request review, and repository design.
Topic-based DITA XML, content reuse with conrefs, and conditional text, including a product case study.
Information typing, modular content, repository structure, and consistent article templates.
API reference templates, a machine-readable documentation API, and technical review with engineers.
Build, check, and publish pipelines, and content generated from data with Python and Jinja.
One part of the documentation workflow, always with human review: AI-assisted translation, a grounded documentation assistant, and a documentation API for AI agents.
Start from your goal
What are you trying to do?
Define audience, scope, and deliverables before writing a single word.
See the whole production chain, from information gathering to delivery.
Manage documentation like code: version control, review, and CI/CD.
Decide how much structure your content needs, from Markdown to DITA.
Audit what you have: orphaned pages, duplicates, and stale content.
Build, check, and publish documentation automatically on every change.
Ready to use
Practical resources
Templates, checklists, and worked examples you can copy into your own project.
Run before merging any documentation change.
One change, from branch to production, annotated step by step.
One endpoint per page: method, parameters, request/response, error codes.
Goal, audience, scope, format, success criteria, timeline.
AI documentation assistant
Explore the documentation
Describe what you need in your own words. Answers are generated from this site’s content only, with links to the pages they drew on. To use the content in your own tools or agents, see the documentation API.
Answer
Sources & Further Reading
Reference
Browse all documentation
Every page in the manual, grouped as in the navigation menu.
1. Understand documentation6 pages
2. Build a documentation process10 pages
3. Adopt docs-as-code11 pages
4. Choose an authoring model11 pages
- Overview
- Structured authoring
- DITA
- From document to modular document base
- Source vs target formats
5. Build your toolkit18 pages
- Overview
- Templates
- Checklists
- Worked examples
- API documentation
6. Automation & legacy techniques11 pages
Explore the reference3 pages
Documentation API & AI2 pages
Release milestones
Releases of the whole site, tagged in its Git repository.
Technical writing portfolio repositioning
Repositions the site as Olivier Carrère's senior technical writer portfolio, with a task-oriented homepage and a recruiter-friendly Expertise page.
Builds on the editorial design system, the 2026 EN/FR content audit and the new six-section navigation.
Information architecture and documentation platform
Introduces an information architecture organised around reader goals and restructures every article into concept, task or reference pages, with a practical toolkit and glossary.
Adds a static documentation API (llms.txt, JSON index, schema.json, field selection and pagination), the Ask the documentation assistant and the Documentation Explorer.
Astro + Starlight migration
Replaces the Sphinx/reStructuredText build with an Astro + Starlight site whose content is authored in Markdown/MDX (merge of PR #2). This is the foundation of the current site and the first release after the 1.x Sphinx line.
At this commit the legacy reStructuredText sources are still in the tree; the Astro project moved to the repository root and the content conversion was completed in the commits that follow.
This site is Olivier Carrère's technical writing practice: a practical guide to designing, writing, maintaining, and publishing technical documentation, based on his methods, projects, and experience. His professional profile presents his background, selected work, and articles.
Whether you're choosing between DITA XML and Markdown, migrating to a docs-as-code workflow, or integrating documentation into a CI/CD pipeline — these guides cover the methods, formats, and tools that make technical documentation a sustainable, scalable engineering practice.