Vale notes #2: Talk to experts and stakeholders

In addition to eating my own dogfood, I started finding and talking to experts and stakeholders.

For experts, I went to folks inside and outside Red Hat. At Red Hat, I talked to Fabrice Flore-Thebault and Yana Hontyk. Last year, they presented on using Vale with their documentation sets: Eclipse Che and CodeReady Workspaces. I talked to them about their workflow, the issues they had fixed, and results.

Outside Red Hat, I pulled together an unconference session at Write the Docs Portland conference with Mike Jang from GitLab and Jodie Putrino at NGINX. They spoke about their differing approaches to rolling it out at their organizations. Lynette Miles at TAG1 Consulting also contributed.

For stakeholders:

• I talked with my manager, who was supportive.
• I arranged a meeting for Yana and Fabrice to present their work to a small group of writers, content strategists, and managers who had expressed an interest in rolling out Vale. The group expressed a lot of interest, and we agreed there should be some follow-up actions, like additional pilot programs.

As an aside, Fabrice and Yana’s presentation included the following impressive graph. It shows how they iterated on both the documentation and Vale style rules to achieve nearly zero errors, both real errors and false positives, over the course of almost two years:

To prepare for the follow-up, I have created a repo that contains a preliminary set of Vale config files and styles: https://github.com/rolfedh/studious-fortnight (definitely a work-in-progress).