4:00 pm ET
“Great Docs: Building the Documentation Site Generator I Always Wanted”
with Rich IannoneDocumentation generators have for me been a thing where there are so many trade-offs. They might make beautiful sites but be shallow feature-wise. Or full of features but really hard to configure. After some years of working across R, Python, and the broader open-source ecosystem, I started Great Docs with a simple end goal: your docs should look really great, be easy to discover, and be ready for the AI era.
In this presentation I will walk through the various places I drew inspiration for Great Docs (pkgdown, MATLAB, Elixir, and the Vue.js docs). I'll show how Great Docs makes documentation consumable by both humans and AI agents through Skills and MCP server documentation. I'll share some of the features I obsessively built because I wanted them in my own package docs. Finally, I'll discuss where this project is headed beyond Python (toward documenting CLIs, TUIs, and more).
Meet Rich Iannone
Rich is a software engineer and someone who cares a great deal about documentation and summary tables. He's been working on table presentation and documentation packages for quite a long time, and nobody has told him to stop yet, so, he's still on top of all that. He started off mostly creating open-source packages in R but, more lately, he's been doing open-source things in Python. Rich really enjoys creating all these packages because he realizes that people can use 'em to do great things in their own work.
Recent Events
#47 Pixi: Package management that doesn't stop at Python packages.
Ruben Arts — May 27, 2026
Pixi is a cross-platfrom cross-language package manager that is build on top of the conda-ecosystem and integrates well with PyPI. It provides a workflow similar to other modern packages managers like uv, yarn, cargo but for every language on every OS. In this presentation you'll learn the basic usage of Pixi and where it really shines. More info can be found on https://pixi.sh
If you’re interested in learning more about packaging, Ruben has recommended watching:
Watch on Youtube#46 Build your castle, dig your moat: AI sovereignty, provenance and compliance
Dawn Wages — April 29, 2026
Your intelligent application is your castle, and your security practices are the moat that protects it. Inside your castle, you must aim for full visibility into what you’re running and why, with freedom to iterate without vendor rate limits or surprise API changes. Your moat creates your security perimeter, ensuring no proprietary data leaves your castle and enforcing best practices including data provenance, cryptographically signed models, evaluation tools, build pipelines and reproducible environments.
Build on your infrastructure, answer to your requirements, scale on your terms.
In this Python Exchange you’ll learn…
- What AI sovereignty actually means for your stack and your business
- How to evaluate self-hosted, local LLMs
- Overview of supply chain security controls for data and code artifacts – provenance, signatures and compliance measures, opacity and trust signals
#45 Diátaxis in practice - and in the wild
Daniele Procida — March 25, 2026
You let ideas loose and then they have a very interesting life of their own!
It’s nearly ten years since I first began writing and talking about the ideas that shaped the Diátaxis documentation approach. In that time, I’ve seen Diátaxis adopted widely, including in contexts I had not even anticipated. I’m aware of hundreds of software projects that use it.
I now have a much stronger sense of how it’s interpreted and used, especially when those ideas are picked up by people that I haven’t met or spoken to.
The lessons learned from seeing what happens when people get hold of those ideas have helped me understand the problems it’s actually solving - not always the ones I’d expected. It has also given me insight into the aspects of the framework that are liable to be misunderstood, or interpreted too rigidly.
Watch on YoutubeAbout Us
At Don’t Use This Code, we want to create a unique opportunity to see Python succeed and thrive within the National Labs! We propose creating a new resource for scientists, researchers, and technical staff to support their use of Python and to build a strong, lasting community for Python users within the Department of Energy National Labs. Disclaimer: The Python Exchange is an independent group of Python enthusiasts who wish to see the use of Python and open-source computing thrive within the National Lab system. This group is not sponsored by or affiliated with the Department of Energy.