Does anyone need help with documentation?

ruby-talk
1

Hello everyone,

I'm a budding rails developer who used to work as a writer and editor,
so if anyone needs any help with writing documentation, I'm more than
happy to lend a hand.

Thanks to Udacity, Coursera, and Codecademy, I've been learning
programming on my own for the past year and a half; but I'll be
completing an intense web apprenticeship over the next three months to
solidify my knowledge. I hope to improve even more by helping out other
programmers with their documentation and checking out their code.

Thanks a lot, and I look forward to getting involved with the Ruby
community. Take care!

Regards,

Mark

P.S. I apologize if there is a better forum for this post. If there's a
better forum for it, please let me know which one it is. Thanks again.

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2

"if anyone needs any help with writing documentation, I'm more than
happy to lend a hand"

I don't think you will find many people who will respond to this -
mostly developers are too lazy to write documentation.

BUT what may be VERY useful is if you start to collect which projects
need help, then point this out, and then offer help.

If some projects respond and the documentation improves, this will help
everyone.

My personal pet peeve:

Ruby stdlib documentation. It needs improvement.

Python guys have better documentation!!!

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3

Thank you for your answer, Marc! I'll have a look at some projects and
see which ones need help with their documentation, and I'll follow your
advice from there.

And I agree that Ruby's stdlib documentation needs a bit of work; at
first I thought it was just me because I'm fairly new, so I'm glad I'm
not the only one who thinks so. (It still helps me out immensely, of
course.)

Thanks again.

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4

Thanks a lot for your advice, Justin; I really appreciate Ruby vets
lending me a hand.

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5

Please check out these links if you are planning to contribute documentation for Ruby itself:

http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2011-05-10-contributing-to-ruby-s-documentation

If you would like to contribute to other projects, consider starting with a project you are using or would like to use. It's much easier to understand what's going on if you are actually trying to use the software at the same time. Note every little thing that causes you trouble so that you can go back later and write up documentation to help others. Even if you don't contribute to the project itself, putting that information into a blog post will probably be helpful to others!

-Justin

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On 11/30/2013 07:39 AM, Mark Brown wrote:

Thank you for your answer, Marc! I'll have a look at some projects and
see which ones need help with their documentation, and I'll follow your
advice from there.

And I agree that Ruby's stdlib documentation needs a bit of work; at
first I thought it was just me because I'm fairly new, so I'm glad I'm
not the only one who thinks so. (It still helps me out immensely, of
course.)

Thanks again.