The Joys of Open-Source Docs
Published on August 7, 2020
Debuggery
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- visibility: ['public']
- author: {'uid': ['/'], 'name': ['Maxwell Joslyn'], 'note': ['I am a human bean']}
- url: ['/2020/08/07/mz', '/2020/08/07/1']
- type: ['entry']
Yesterday's good deed: revising and rewriting technical documentation for a cryptocurrency company's open-source project.
I've long had the habit of emailing people I find on the Web to notify them of typos, or dead webpages, but only recently have I realized:
- how little time and energy companies typically devote to writing documentation (relative to resources spent on the systems being documented)
- how many projects have software docs and similar written resources in public version control repos
- how easy it is to fix written documents when they're hosted on version control platforms like GitHub
I hope to continue helping out with FOSS projects' technical-writing needs, especially when there's an opportunity to help Chinese-speaking teams translate material into native English.