Ask HN: Examples of good technical design docs

14 points by gru 6 years ago | 5 comments

As part of an interview process, I have recently received a take home assignment of writing a technical design doc for a simple web app. Turns out I badly suck at it.

I have found resources describing the templates, the "hows" and "whys" of TDD, but I struggle to find some actual, real-life examples.

Can you recommend any good technical design docs? Or any other resource that would make you better at writing such documents?

wh-uws 6 years ago |

I got a lot of good information on writing design docs from here

https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/design-docs-at-googl...

also if you just Google the 2 words "design docs" there's actually a surprising amount of useful things that pop up

gru 6 years ago | |

Thanks, I'm familiar with the link you posted. You're also right that there's plenty of online resources about writing technical design docs.

However, what I'm looking for are not the articles about writing technical design but the actual design documents. Preferably ones that are considered well written by the community.

boredatworkme 6 years ago | | |

I've prepared some technical design documents for my day job. I think this somewhat comes close to the template that we follow. Take a look if this works for you:

https://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/pgasite/docume...

{I'm not sure if there is a golden sample that can be referred to. Gitlab has some good docs as well. Maybe that will help?}

asicsp 6 years ago |

These might help:

* https://github.com/jenniferlynparsons/awesome-writing

* https://www.divio.com/blog/documentation/

w_t_payne 6 years ago |

Here's a good resource that I find useful:- http://everyspec.com/USAF/USAF-SMC/SMC-S-012_16JAN2015_52130...