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Documentation as Promotion

Documentation isn’t just something you write after the code works.
It’s how you scale yourself, sell your project, and teach your users — all at once.

I'm currently building out a series of video tutorials for noCRUD, my open-source end-to-end API testing tool. In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be recording, editing, and publishing multiple video series on YouTube — and cross-posting to other platforms.

These videos walk through how noCRUD works, how to set it up, and how to extend it. Some are structured as tutorials, others as story-driven walkthroughs, and many will be unpolished, real-time sessions where I work through bugs, design decisions, or experiments.

Each video becomes both:

  • Documentation — showing exactly how the tool behaves
  • Content — that I can later chop up into shortform clips for promotion

📽 Why I'm Moving Beyond usage.md​

Text alone isn’t enough for a tool like this.
noCRUD isn’t a library — it’s a system, a scaffold. The user should understand the source code inside and out: config, different types of flows, automatic v. manual registration, environment setup (provisioning), orchestration, how to customize depending on your specific requirements, etc. There are too many moving parts to explain statically.

You have to see it:

  • Watch how the DB spins up per flow
  • See the logs stream while flows execute
  • Feel how fast provisioning should be

So rather than maintain a longform usage.md, I’m shifting that material into video-based onboarding.

🧠 People Learn Through Context, Not Syntax​

Docs can describe what provision() does.

But video shows:

  • How it fits into the lifecycle
  • What happens when something goes wrong
  • Why certain defaults exist
  • How flow reuse actually feels in practice

I'm focused less on showing what the code is, and more on how the system behaves — and that requires motion.

📊 Documentation as a Growth Channel​

This isn’t just about education — it’s also about promotion.

If someone discovers noCRUD:

  • They see a clean README
  • Click into an architecture video
  • Watch a CRUD flow execute cleanly

They’re already 80% onboarded.

And because I’m capturing everything in longform, I can later cut:

  • Short tutorials for docs
  • Promotional clips for social
  • Error explanations for debugging sections

🛠 My Workflow​

Here's how I'm approaching it:

  1. Record in one go — no practice runs, no perfectionism
  2. Edit after — only if needed
  3. Use videos as source of truth — not just supplementary material
  4. Cross-link from the docs — or embed directly
  5. Promote from the same raw footage

This way, each recording session produces:

  • Real documentation
  • Potential shortform content
  • An archive of system behavior

🧩 The Real Takeaway​

If your tool solves a real problem, documentation shouldn't just tell.
It should show.

That’s what I’m doing with noCRUD.

In-progress docs don’t have to mean incomplete docs.
Sometimes, the best documentation is the process itself — captured in motion.

📺 Coming Soon​

Check out the initial video plan here
and please follow along as I start posting videos to YouTube and elsewhere.