Read the Docs has been committed to improving the accessibility and user experience of Sphinx since the start, and that includes the markup language in which the documentation is written. Years ago, after carefully listening to users, we announced recommonmark to help bridging the immense popularity of Markdown with the powerful capabilities of Sphinx. (It is now deprecated in favor of MyST - keep reading to know more.)

It is no surprise that Markdown is in such demand: thanks in large part to the huge popularity of GitHub, Markdown is nowadays the most widely used markup language in open-source projects, ahead of reStructuredText, the second in the list, by an order of magnitude.

During the first half of 2021 several team members of Read the Docs have talked about the company in podcasts and online events. If you want to learn more about our company directly from the people that are a core part of it, and hear our thoughts on other topics like open source sustainability and developer advocacy, this blog post is for you.

Eric was the special guest of Sustain back in February, “a podcast about sustaining open source in the long haul”. Eric started by telling the story of how he and Anthony co-founded Read the Docs, talked about the Write the Docs community, described the challenges of launching EthicalAds in 2020, and discussed the opportunities of using ethical advertising to fund open source projects.