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Ideas List (2023)

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Saroj Maharjan edited this page Mar 30, 2023 · 14 revisions

Every Google Season of Docs project begins with a project idea, which is a publicly visible page that serves as an overview of your documentation project. A good project idea includes:

  • A statement of the problem your project needs to solve (“users on Windows don’t have clear guidance of how to install our project”).
  • The documentation that might solve this problem (“We want to create a quickstart doc and installation guide for Windows users”).
  • How you’ll measure the success of your documentation (“With a good quickstart, we expect to see 50% fewer issues opened about Windows installation problems.”).
  • What skills your technical writer would need (break down into “must have” and “nice to have” categories. “Must have: access Windows machine to test instructions”).
  • What volunteer help is needed from community members (“need help onboarding technical writers to our discussion groups”) and links to where the community can discuss the proposal.)
  • Most importantly, include a way for interested technical writers to reach you and ask questions!

The following ideas are for GSoD 2023.

Ruby Interpreter (MRI)

Project Idea: Create a quickstart doc and detailed documentation as well as ruby installation guide for Windows users

Problem

Users on Windows don’t have clear guidance of how to install Ruby. We want to create a quickstart doc and installation guide for Windows users.

Ruby adaptation from windows users is falling ever more behind as it is harder to install ruby on windows OS. Googling 'percent of windows vs other operating systems' and it shows windows has a share of 76%. Ceding that users to python and other programming languages has to be one of the reasons python continues get more market share from Ruby. With better documentation, installing ruby on windows can be made much easier for newcomers.

New comers aren't able to find the setup information they need to install and get started with ruby on windows. Some processes (such as installing ruby on windows using vcpkg) aren't well documented.

Hints on where to start

What is the expected outcome at the end of GSoD 2023?

The technical writer should produce multiple guides on how to setup all the tools necessary and instal Ruby on windows so that even a noob can follow along easily. There are various ways of installing ruby on windows using:

  1. mswin, VC++, nmake, vcpkg etc
  2. mingw-ucrt, mingw-msvcrt
  3. rubyinstaller, msys2
  4. wsl2
  5. others

How would we measure success?

  • With a good quickstart, we expect to see more adoption of Ruby from windows users.
  • Increase in the number of new users from windows OS
  • Increase in the number of new non-code contributors (by making it easier to contribute to docs or tests)
  • Decrease in the number of issues raised with installing ruby on windows

What skills would a technical writer need to work on this project?

  • Must have: Familiarity with GitHub (or willingness to work through GitHub tutorials)
  • Must have: Access to Windows machine in order to test instructions.
  • Nice to have: Familiarity with our test runner, in order to run our tests and update the documentation for doing so

Volunteers

Community members are encouraged to sign up to help with specific tasks, for example:

  • @zoras, can help onboarding technical writers to our discussion groups
  • @ioquatix, can help with answering questions about our tests
  • @hsbt, happy to review docs pull requests
  • @ioquatix, can walk through current contribution process with technical writer

Contact info

Technical writers interested in working on this project should contact @ioquatix. Please include links to your technical writing work or portfolio/résumé/CV.

Hotwire

Project Idea: Create a quickstart doc and detailed documentation as well as guide for installing and using Hotwire with Turbo and Stimulus

Problem

Hotwire is a collection of tools introduced in Rails 7 to reduce javascript use on frontend. Although it is promising, it has zero guide or documentation on it's official website Hotwired.dev.

People who want to try it out are often left frustated like this:

https://twitter.com/ncphi/status/1634151453328658433

Hotwired seemed really neat, but I was never able to realize that feeling your talking about. I spent most of the time crawling. I think the core problem was the docs. I really struggled to make anything work. Y’all need a @sarah11918 to help make it more accessible to new people

Documentation for Hotwire will make it easier for newcomers to adopt the new tools and make it easier for developers to lookup method documentations.

What is the expected outcome at the end of GSoD 2023?

  • Documentation for Hotwire

Hints on where to start

Volunteers

Community members are encouraged to sign up to help with specific tasks, for example:

  • @zoras, can help onboarding technical writers to our discussion groups
  • @mjc-gh, found a ton of success on multiple apps now with Hotwire and Turbo.

[For contributors] Propose Your Own? If nothing on this list interests you, you can always propose your own. Ask a person who is a candidate of the mentor and send an email to Saroj [email protected] about the project plan and mentor's recommendation. Interested technical writers can post their details here as well

[For mentor candidates] Propose your project? Please ask Saroj [email protected] about it and add your project in this project. Any Ruby-related projects (interpreter, eco-system, documentation, ...) are welcome.

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