Edinburgh, 12th December 2019 - Simply Tidying up Documentation
Where and When?
This December, we’ll be meeting up in FreeAgent on Thursday the 12th, at 18:00. That’s in their Edinburgh offices on Fountainbridge.
There will be someone at reception to let you up to FreeAgent’s offices from 17:30 until 18:00. If you arrive later than that, send an email to the mailing list or send us a tweet. Someone will come down for you.
What?
December brings short nights and bright lights in Edinburgh. It’s also tradtionally a month of giving in Scotland, and this month ScotRUG are going to run a wee workshop with the aim of contributing back to Rails community.
Let’s set the scene: I find myself reading documentation in three main situations: getting started with something new, checking the details of something I’ve used before, and when trying to debug something that isn’t working. When I’m getting started with something, or when I’m stuck on something, documentation is something to help guide a new, possibly frustrated human towards more understanding. So when I come across documentation saying “just do this” or “simply do that” and I’ve already tried that thing, it’s quite frustrating. So, last month, the excellent Emma Barnes (who has a website to dedicated to this very problem) tweeted out examples of these documentation anti-patterns in the Rails docs. So, in the spirit of giving back, let’s see if we can contribute some PRs to remove this sort of language from the Rails guides to make them cleaner and less frustrating!
Bring a curious mind and a willingness to start editing, and we’ll go through how to contribute to the Rails docs, and then get started.
ScotRUG welcomes first timers and regular attendees, whether you’re new to the language or not. We’d love to see you there!