Over the past one year I have done a LOT of documentation work. I impart a little knowledge in this blog! So let's go -->
Why contribute to docs.
It's a gateway contribution towards open source organizations.
- You gain a lot of surface level knowledge about an organization before you know which part of the organization you REALLY want to contribute to.
- It's a fantastic opportunity to learn about the community- is it an active community, are the people warm and welcoming, is the communication transparent and public, etc.
- Documentation, in my perspective, is comparable to dirty laundry. Everyone wants clean clothing at the end of the day, even though nobody wants to do it!
Everyone has their pet contribution, documentation happens to be mine.
Guess what? Documentation can be your gateway / foot in the door contribution as well.
Resources and tools
As Taylor Swift says:
"I really do think we are all writers. And most of us write in a different voice for different situations. You write differently in your Instagram stories than you do your senior thesis. You send a different type of email to your boss than you do your best friend from home. We are all literary chameleons and I think it’s fascinating."
So we ALL are writers! I believe that the
Technical writing by Google developers is an excellent resource to learn about some general technical writing rules!
Easlo's tweet suggests some great tools to make that your writing is crisp. They are:
- Grammarly—Write mistake-free.
- QuillBot—Rewrite any paragraph or article.
- Hemingway—Make your writing bold and clear.
- CopyAI—Create marketing copy in seconds.
Top comments (8)
Thank you for the post! It's great to keep spreading that open source is also contributing to documentation.
At first it might not seem as cool as writing new features, but it's a pillar of open source nonetheless!
Definitely! It's the 'boring' job. But it is necessary.
Nice post. Thanks for encouraging people to contribute to docs. I definitely appreciate documentation contributions to projects I maintain. Well, I do when they are actual improvements, such as correcting something that got out of date relative to changes made to project, or correcting typos, etc.
Ahaha! Yes. Valuable contributions make all the difference. Unlike the hacktoberfest spam. :')
I definitely know what you mean about hacktoberfest spam. Last year to minimize risk of that I labeled certain issues for hacktoberfest in one of my repos, and I mostly got valuable contributions.
I like how this talks about how documentation can help YOU, usually it is feels like something that is done for others.
It also makes me think about how a software product cannot thrive without an active community, and how important good documentation is in growing your community.
Thanks, Kishan!
An active community is SO important. I have contributed to organizations where they don't really care about the new contributors. (Maybe because the new contributors don't stick around)
BUT it's so important to make someone feel welcome!