I've got a lot of respect for someone who does documentation, especially "vital and high-quality" stuff. By far the hugest problem with FOSS these days is the lack of good documentation, especially for non-techies. I recall way back during my first stint as a UNIX Sys-Admin in 1991 at the university, when I was asked by someone in the Math Dept to install LaTex onto the server. I struggled with that sucker for a couple of months before I finally gave up. Problem was that the installation docs - what litter there were - assumed you were a hard-core LaTex user, and I didn't know a damned thing about it.
Fortunately we have come a long way since then, and there are lots of great FOSS projects these days that do have good docs. Unfortunately there are still a lot which do not.
I've always said at work that if you aren't spending at least 5% of your time documenting in detail what you do, then neither you nor your manager are doing your jobs. I document everything I do in a wiki as well.
Congrats Eric!
funTomas
· 3 years ago
Well, documenting of any project is a MUST if the project is to be used by humans. Anyway, I completely agree with bodensatz. Sun had IMO quite on time realized this issue and created doc comments in Java. I just wonder what processes, technologies and paterns are in use by Mozilla Doc team. Congrats Eric.
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Fortunately we have come a long way since then, and there are lots of great FOSS projects these days that do have good docs. Unfortunately there are still a lot which do not.
I've always said at work that if you aren't spending at least 5% of your time documenting in detail what you do, then neither you nor your manager are doing your jobs. I document everything I do in a wiki as well.
Congrats Eric!
Congrats Eric.