Our Approach

Sentry uses a minimalist approach to documentation. Our docs have one goal: help customers gain mastery quickly. Minimalism in documentation puts the reader at the center of the content. Our audience is reading the documentation to solve a problem or finalize a setup or to understand. Thus, think very critically about the content that is provided, especially on a primary page.

Ask these questions as you're developing content:

  • Is this information critical to helping a developer get up and running? If not, consider moving it to a subpage with a link to it from the primary page (or, as suggested by one of our engineering managers, "cool, I can bookmark this for later").

  • Is this obvious from the UI? Our UI is largely self-documenting, so we don't need to explain what's already evident.

Our content has some pretty clear divisions:

  • Platform/SDK content - instrument and configure your SDK
  • Product content - look at all the data ingested into Sentry

And within those primary categories:

  • Reference: What customers need to know
  • Action: What customers can do (modify, filter, and so forth)

If you're uncertain, ask.

Keep these concepts in mind when contributing to docs:

  1. Technical accuracy is our primary consideration. Our content helps every developer diagnose, fix, and optimize their code.
  2. Use inclusive language, which we discuss more fully here.
  3. Feedback is a gift - share your PR so we can improve our content.
Help improve this content
Our documentation is open source and available on GitHub. Your contributions are welcome, whether fixing a typo (drat!) or suggesting an update ("yeah, this would be better").