[Host10] Upcoming webinar: One Good Tutorial: Defining a “Minimum Viable Documentation Product” for Scientific Software

[IDEAS Project Outreach Lead]

The next webinar in the HPC Best Practices (https://ideas-productivity.org/resources/series/hpc-best-practices-webinars/) series is:

One Good Tutorial: Defining a “Minimum Viable Documentation Product” for Scientific Software
1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
Wednesday, March 18, 2026

Presenter: Peter K. G. Williams (Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian)
Description:

Many of us aspire to provide high-quality documentation alongside our scientific software. However, we rarely have much time to write it, and it is easy to get stuck staring at the proverbial “blank page” when we finally sit down to begin.

In this talk, I present recommendations based on the concept of a “minimum viable documentation product”: what is the least amount of documentation you need to prepare while still serving your users well? These recommendations are collected in a new resource called One Good Tutorial (https://onegoodtutorial.org/) , whose name captures the central idea. You need to provide one good tutorial that shows people how—and why—to use your code. You should provide more than that, but not much more. One Good Tutorial outlines a checklist of nine essential elements that your documentation should almost certainly include. The resource also offers a “playbook” with a suggested workflow for creating a new, checklist-compliant documentation set, along with supporting in-depth guides. I also discuss the design and implementation of the resource itself.

This work was supported by a 2025 Better Scientific Software Fellowship.
Participation is free, but registration is required. Registrants will also receive an email when the recording of the webinar is available.
Register (https://www.zoomgov.com/meeting/register/wjQvbQjnQRiNqG9p6McZJw)
Forward to a Friend (https://us16.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=5438ff2caf2456f6ec49ebfbf&id=0e98382c7e&e=b9db70c2a7)
Past webinars are archived at our website (https://ideas-productivity.org/resources/series/hpc-best-practices-webinars/) .  The most recent additions are:
* Modernizing C++ Interfaces with Concepts, Constraints and std::mdspan (https://ideas-productivity.org/events/hpcbp-096-cpp)  (February 2026)
* Please, No More Loops (Than Necessary): New Patterns in Fortran 2023 (https://ideas-productivity.org/events/hpcbp-095-fortran)  (January 2026)
* Sustainable HPC Software: A Maintainer's Perspective (https://ideas-productivity.org/events/hpcbp-094-sustainable-sw)  (October 2025)

We welcome your suggestions for future topics and presenters: https://bit.ly/hpc-bp-suggestions.
The Best Practices for HPC Software Developers (https://ideas-productivity.org/resources/series/hpc-best-practices-webinars/) webinar series is produced by the IDEAS Productivity (http://ideas-productivity.org/) family of projects, in partnership with the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (http://www.alcf.anl.gov/) (ALCF), National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (http://www.nersc.gov/) (NERSC), Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/) (OLCF), and developing DOE software stewardship organizations.

============================================================
This message was sent to host10 at designsafe-ci.org
 You are receiving this email because you opted-in at our web site or you registered for or participated in a previous IDEAS-organized event.

Did a friend forward this message to you?
You can ** subscribe to this list (http://eepurl.com/cQCyJ5)

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can ** update your preferences (https://ideas-productivity.us16.list-manage.com/profile?u=5438ff2caf2456f6ec49ebfbf&id=a7f7d33358&e=b9db70c2a7&c=0e98382c7e)
or ** unsubscribe from this list (https://ideas-productivity.us16.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=5438ff2caf2456f6ec49ebfbf&id=a7f7d33358&t=b&e=b9db70c2a7&c=0e98382c7e)

Our mailing address is:
IDEAS Outreach
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
POB 2008, MS 6164
Oak Ridge, Tn 37831-6164
USA
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.designsafe-ci.org/pipermail/host10/attachments/20260224/4869b0f6/attachment-0001.html>