Hi,

I’m a technical writer looking to build my portfolio in technical documentation. I’ve written technical blogs, how-to guides, and white papers for SaaS brands, but I want to gain experience working on back-end documentation.

I’m familiar with Python, HTML, CSS, C/C++ (to some extent), and SQL. Additionally, I’ve done considerable writing for cloud computing clients, so I have a solid understanding of cloud concepts.

I can work with Markdown, Git, or even Google Docs.

Please let me know if you’re working on an open-source project that could use some documentation. Alternatively, if you know of an existing open-source tool that could benefit from documentation, I’d be happy to contact the developer.

43 points
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NixOS

😉

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22 points

User perspective:

If you want something big I’d pitch nixos. As in the core distribution. It’s a documentation nightmare and as a user I had to go over options search and then trying to figure out what they mean more often than I found a comprehensive documentation.

That would be half writing and half coordinating writers though I suspect.

Another great project with mixed quality documentation is openhab. It fits the bill of more backend heavy side and the devs are very open in my experience. I see it actually as superior in its core concepts to the way more popular home assistant in every aspect except documentation!

That said: thanks for putting the effort in! ♥

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13 points

Thank you. I’ll look into NixOS as we need Linux documentation to welcome more users from Windows.

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1 point

If that’s your intend than it might be better to pick individual arch wiki pages or improve the entry documentation. Many people refer to there from all distro because of its volume.

A “how to read tech documentation” could add value for this target group.

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16 points
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I will go out on a limb and say FreeCAD and KiCAD specifically in examples. Right now you have to search forum posts and videos to find out how to make something work and it is always an older version completely irrelevant to the current version.

For other things that need note basic general and setup documentation:

Traefik: It is only decodable to experienced people right now. I tried about 15 tutorials a few years ago and SmartHomeBeginner was the only one that actually was able to connect to the internet and didn’t “rest of the fucking owl” it

Authelia could also use some documentation updates specifically around the area of integrations.

Libopencm3 also could use some more complete documentation instead of basic API descriptions, but the project is not very active anymore

Opensuse Aeon and Kalpa could also use some documentation love, especially Kalpa.

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13 points

FreeCAD looks like a nice project because I’m a mechanical engineer as well. So, I’ll look into it.

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3 points

It’s also on the cusp of a major upgrade release, so good documentation of the latest version’s features will be in high demand very soon.

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14 points

I know 2 people have already said it, but NixOS is in very desparate need of documentation. It’s so immensely difficult and at a certain point the learning curve feels more like a vertical line than a curve, so that’s my top pick.

Other than that, I recently tried a project called Bluebuild and its docs are very incomplete (also the project doesn’t work for me but that’s another topic).

In fact, the topics of packaging software and creating (custom) live isos are both very underdocumented in general.

So packaging for deb and rpm is also quite difficult to find good and easy to follow docs and guides for.

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11 points

Do you mean the user documentation, or code documentation for contributing to the project?

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13 points

I’m referring to the user documentation.

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