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I got accepted into this three-month internship for open source. I'm contributing to documentation and I'm expected to blog about it every two weeks, but I think I'd write every week. I'm doing a #12WeeksOfOutreachy on Twitter too, so this blog augments it.
This week is officially ended. My thoughts on my first week? I'd divide it into sections.
General Rant:
Documentation is not child's play.
It is so complex😭😭😭😭😭😭.
But, it is an interesting learning experience and my mentors are super helpful.
For now, I'm only expected to work with the template in my final application and create one PR per week.
Task For The Week:
- Separate the installation guides according to OS so it's easier to navigate.
Challenges:
- I wanted to bring out work that would be perfect or at least "good enough", but doing that made starting the actual work hard. I spoke to my mentor about it (not outreachy), and I found that speaking out about my challenge helped me realise I had already figured out how to work my way around it. I just wasn't confident with it and it did seem huge to start with.
So, I outlined to the most basic steps and followed them one by one.
I didn't finish it, because it turns out separating an installation guide according to OS can be trickier than you think, but I did something significant and created a PR.
Image of the steps to follow from google tasks.
Has to be figuring out markdowns. Why can't VsCode just have text editors? 😂 To tackle this, I watched a few youtube videos and just googled.
How to create user-friendly documentation. Now, this part is going to take a while to figure out. But, what I did, and would still be doing for a while is to check out cool documentation of other software and figure out how to implement them in Augur's doc.
I also joined the Write The Docs community on slack. I'm hoping it'd ramp up my learning.
Pat On The Back:
One thing I did this week that I'm proud of was to be accountable for myself. So, my mentors are pretty chill and there wasn't any requirement for me to do a standup every day as long as I did the expected tasks. But then I figured doing one would teach me to be more accountable and responsible, not to mention model a potential workplace in the future.
What I did was ask to check in every day. It didn't have to be formal, and they didn't have to reply to it, I just wanted to do it so I'd get used to it. Their timezone is CST, and mine is WAT, so to accommodate everyone, I just suggested we use 10 am CST time. Their day is just starting, and I'm back from work at that period, so I can focus on outreachy, so it's super cool.
Also, a special shoutout to @_MsLinda on Twitter. For now, she's the only documenter I know of and using the resources on her Twitter page has been helpful.