The Art of Documentation and Readme.md for Open Source Projects
The Readme is becoming essential to successful Open Source projects. The Readme is a gateway to welcoming new users and potential contributors. It defines the tone of the project, how to get started a …
| Talk Title | The Art of Documentation and Readme.md for Open Source Projects |
| Speakers | Ben Hall (Founder, Katacoda) |
| Conference | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America |
| Conf Tag | |
| Location | Austin, TX, United States |
| Date | Dec 4- 8, 2017 |
| URL | Talk Page |
| Slides | Talk Slides |
| Video | |
The Readme is becoming essential to successful Open Source projects. The Readme is a gateway to welcoming new users and potential contributors. It defines the tone of the project, how to get started and most importantly, the aim. While many Open Source projects have amazing code-bases, the Readme and documentation are letting them down and as a result they are losing influence and opportunities for adoption and feedback. In this talk, Ben uses his expertise of building an Interactive Learning Platform to highlight The Art of Documentation and the Readme file. The aim of the talk is to help open source contributors understand how small changes to their documentation approach can have an enormous impact on how users get started. Ben will discuss: - How to create engaging documentation - Defining technical details in an accessible way - Building documentation that encourages users to get started - How to manage documentation and keeping it up-to-date and relevant In the end, attendees will have an understanding of how to build beautiful, useful documentation. This will be backed by examples from some of the best open source projects.
