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Today is the 20th birthday of Google’s developer documentation style guide.

I created the first version of the style guide as a Google-internal wiki page on Sept. 15, 2005.

For the first few years of its existence, the style guide was very tentative. Several of Google’s tech writers had previously worked at Oracle, where there was an extremely strict style guide, and they didn’t want anyone to tell them how to write. So in our guide, I included multiple ways to do things, and disclaimers saying that nobody needed to follow the guide, and other such attempts to be flexible.

Eventually, a few other writers told me that they wanted a prescriptive guide that would tell them what to do. I noted that I didn’t have any authority to make style decisions for the group, so my then-manager authorized me to do so, with the aid of other tech writers. So I removed some of the waffling from the guide. I gradually came to understand that the main point of having a style guide is to record style decisions that you’ve made, so that you don’t have to keep re-deciding the same questions over and over.

I had welcomed contributions from colleagues from the start, but for the first few years, they rarely contributed; it was mostly written by me. But then a few colleagues joined in (some of whom are reading this—hi!) and started making substantial improvements to it. We started meeting regularly to go over what needed to be done and to assign tasks to people.

Sometime around 2015, a colleague asked me to make the style guide public. After a whole lot of internal politicking, we made a version of it public in 2017 (with some internal-only material in conditional text that wasn’t displayed publicly).

And then I switched organizations within the company, to Google Cloud, and suddenly I had colleagues whose job title included the word Editor. At Google before that point, editors were few and far between; my official title was Technical Writer even though my role had been mostly editorial for several years before I moved to Cloud. But these new editors had been hired specifically to be editors.

I brought ownership of the style guide with me, and the other editors and I continued with the regular meetings to make style decisions and assign tasks. The other editors did a huge amount of work on adding to and improving the guide; I continued to do a little of that here and there, but most of my style guide work became administrative—running meetings, writing up weekly-or-so release notes, reviewing others’ contributions, etc.

In 2021, I had a disastrous blowup over the style guide with my then-grandmanager. It took months to dig out from under that. Eventually, just as we were reaching a point of resolving the issues, the grandmanager suddenly moved to a different organization. But I had lasting anxiety over the whole thing, and apparently a few other managers (including my grand-grandmanager) came away from that situation with the belief that I was extremely disrespectful. And it left me feeling that the style guide was in a slightly precarious situation—in the midst of the blowup, my grandmanager had casually threatened to cancel the project. He also told us (at least I think this came from him; I could be wrong) that we had to stop including contractors in style decisions; up until then, the contractor editors had played a big role in both decisionmaking and incorporating style decisions into the guide.

At any rate, things settled down somewhat for a while. We also improved various internal systems and processes around the style guide, including documenting how to run the meeting, how to make style decisions, and how to tell people about decisions, so that other people could do those things when I wasn’t around (such as when I was on leave).

Which was a good thing, because I was laid off as part of the mass layoffs in early 2023.

At the time, I didn’t know who else had been laid off, and I had no idea whether the style guide would continue, so I downloaded a copy from the public web. Fortunately, some of my colleagues were not laid off, and they did continue to update the style guide.

Unfortunately, here in late 2025, most of us who were closely involved in the style guide during the time I was there are no longer at Google. I went and looked at the style guide this morning, and it was last updated in May; this is the longest it has gone without an update since we first made it public. I don’t know whether anyone still works on it. :(

(…But I’m glad to see that at least nobody has gone in and removed the inclusivity and respectful-language material that we put in over the years, at least not yet.)

On the plus side, the style guide is Creative Commons licensed (CC BY 4.0), so you can make a copy and modify it as you see fit. I’ll download another copy sometime soon, and at some point I hope to repurpose various pieces of it for various other style guides.

Anyway, I don’t know whether it’s the end of the road for the style guide in its current form. But I’m glad that it’s lasted twenty years, and I’m immensely grateful to all of the colleagues (many of whom have become friends of mine) who put in a huge amount of excellent work over the years to make it what it is. I think that working on the style guide was the most useful work that I did at Google, and I’m proud of what it has become.