How We Use Vale to Improve Our Documentation Editing Process

The Datadog Documentation team has doubled its size over the last three years and now operates with a 200 developer to 1 writer ratio. To maintain quality and consistency, they use Vale, an open-source linting tool that enforces style guidelines in their documentation workflow. By integrating Vale into their authoring environment and CI workflow, the team has automated technical content copy editing, reducing the mental toll on writers and enabling contributors to amend their own contributions before review. The adoption of Vale has helped streamline the process of maintaining high-quality, consistently styled documentation for over 30 products and an open source repository with more than 1,400 internal and external contributors.