Hello @carltongibson and community, my name is Sahil Naphade, I am a third year student at University of Pune (formerly) in Pune, India. I am a full-stack developer and have experience in technical writing in my internship as well as freelancing work. I have worked with Django in my projects, and would love to work with the same to gain an experience in the open source contribution and to work for Django project.
After going through the ideas for GSoD 2020 by Django and the contributing guide to Django, I could come with some ideas to make the guide less overwhelming for the new users. I have mailed the suggestions to email of Official GSoD mail ID of Django.
The new contributor willing to contribute may feel lost while checking out the guide as he may not know exactly where to start, whereas old contributors may feel redundant about the same.
So, my ideas for the refactoring of the guide are as follows:
- I think there is a need of a flow in the guide, like marking out the steps that one needs to follow in order to contribute to the guide successfully.
For e.g., In first steps for new contributors, we can create a we can rearrange the flow as following:
- Analyze ticket’s history
- How to select a ticket:
- Pick a subject area that you care about.
- Start small
- If you are engaging in a big task, make sure idea…
- Wait for feedback
- How to proceed once you have selected a topic
- Err on the side of caution…
- Be rigorous
- Wait for feedback and respond…
- While writing a code, follow the coding style for Django.
(This is just an example. The similar work can be done in coding style guide as well, like step-wise flow of 1. How to use git and GitHub to contribute -> 2.Writing actual code, and such).
- Also, I think adding headers and highlighting them for each the topic will be very useful,
as someone can just look at the header and understand what the page broadly contains. Also, differentiating the sub-sections with a faint line, sections with a bold line or any other form of differentiation.
For e.g. while moving from Triage stages to Other triage attributes, one may get lost as where the respective sections start or end. This may be due to the fact that section headers are slim, whereas the subsection headers are bold. - The language of some parts can be simplified even further.
- The do’s and dont’s of each section can be put into the respective section, in the end.
- The page navigation panel on the right can be fixed, to be able to easily navigate the page.
These are some of the ideas I could come up with. If @carltongibson sir and any other member of community would like to suggest some of my points needs improvement or want to suggest new points, I am happy to hear them. Thank you.