2026-11-04 –, Banquet Hall
Documentation is one of the primary ways that users interact with scientific software, yet it is often treated as an afterthought rather than an integral part of the software itself. Well-designed interactive documentation can reduce barriers to entry, improve reproducibility, and enable researchers to quickly adopt new tools and workflows.
This talk presents practical strategies for developing interactive documentation for astronomy software, drawing on my experience maintaining documentation for multiple Python packages and MAST's repository of Jupyter notebooks. I will discuss how executable notebooks, narrative tutorials, and example-driven documentation can guide users from introductory concepts to real scientific workflows. I will also share approaches for testing documentation alongside code to ensure examples remain functional and trustworthy.
In addition, I will explore how AI-assisted development can support documentation authoring and maintenance. Rather than replacing human expertise, AI tools can help draft tutorials, improve clarity, identify knowledge gaps, and update examples as APIs change, allowing developers to spend more time refining content and less time on repetitive maintenance.
By treating documentation as a core component of scientific software rather than an afterthought, astronomical software projects can improve usability, lower the learning curve for new users, and increase the long-term impact of their tools.
This talk would be relevant to multiple conference themes.
Sam Bianco is a scientific software engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), where she develops software and data access tools for the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). She is the lead developer for the astroquery.mast module and the Astrocut Python package, and she also maintains the MAST Jupyter notebook repository. As an engineer at MAST, Sam has contributed to several software projects, focusing primarily on improving the usability, performance, and accessibility of astronomy software. As part of her efforts, Sam has created and presented dozens of interactive tutorials and examples that help researchers discover, access, and analyze archival data. In addition to her engineering work, Sam also participates in a research project searching for exoplanets around nearby white dwarf stars.