I wanted to somehow contribute to the OpenStack Bug Squashing today but I wasn’t sure what bug to squash. I didn’t have much time to participate so it had to be something I could complete within a couple of hours from scratch. I personally know several members of the OpenStack doc team so I checked out the OpenStack Manuals bug list to see where I could help. Anne helpfully suggested taking a look at this bug.
Documentation is an important (and often neglected) part of any technology. Many are quick to append “…but the docs suck.” to any sentence about a technology, especially open source. So let’s try to do something about it. Raise a bug, fix a bug, review a bug…everything helps.
Plus I think that Developer Advocates should be knowledgable about documentation technologies. Not necessarily experts but they should at least know how to “make it go.” Being able to build the docs and knowing how to make a quality contribution can go a long way here.
Coda
Okay. So I really only fixed one little bug. But the important part to me is that I learned a bit about the doc tool set, it forced me to build the docs, change a doc, verify the change, and submit it for review. Stuff I had never done for the OpenStack Manuals before. Now I’ve paved the way for contributions in the future!