I almost didn’t write this post but I know plenty dinosaurs that won’t know what markdown is and I’m hoping they’ll come on this journey with me so this will hopefully be of benefit to some of them.

Markdown is a markup language for plain text formatting. It’s used to quickly and easily add formatting to documentation. Typically it’s documentation that’s viewed in a browser and the best examples I can think of right now are README files on GitHub or Confluence entries. This blog is also written in markdown. That should mean that all of these things are quickly and easily transferable to other platforms without any loss of formatting or need to reformat.

There are plenty of resources showing you how to use markdown and providing cheat sheets all over the web so I’m not going to go into any more detail or link to anything in particular. From my own experience I will say that I’ve used markdown many times over the past few years but never used it consistently. I still need to look up a cheat sheet just to do basic things like headings and lists. You’ll be able to tell that my skills are improving if and when these blog posts get prettier ;-).

Update 29/01/2019

OK, I said I wouldn’t post any links but I’m just watching this video by James Quick now and it’s worth taking the time, even if just for the VSCode live view tip (Command+K then V).