Rich Bowen

See the following -

Fixing Docs One README at a Time

"Documentation is highly valued, frequently overlooked, and a means for establishing inclusive and accessible communities," the GitHub team notes in their brand-new Open Source Survey. Based on 5,500 responses, the survey reveals that 93% of respondents say "incomplete or outdated documentation is a pervasive problem." However, only "60% of contributors rarely or never contribute to documentation." These stats won't surprise anyone who has spent more than a few minutes clicking through GitHub repositories. How many times have you clicked on a GitHub repo, skimmed the README, and thought: "Sounds interesting, but what does it actually do?"...

How to Write Documentation That's Actually Useful

Steven Vaughan-Nichols | Enterprise.Nxt | July 10, 2017

Programmers love to write code, but they hate to write documentation. Developers always want to read documentation when they inherit a project, but writing it themselves? Feh! How common is this? A recent GitHub survey found that "incomplete or outdated documentation is a pervasive problem," according to 93 percent of respondents. Yet 60 percent of contributors to the open source code repository say they rarely or never contribute to documentation. Their reasoning, for both the open source projects and their own applications? A common attitude that "documentation is for 'lusers' who don't write good code!"...

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The Anvil Podcast: OpenMRS

Several weeks ago I went to the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon. The OpenMRS project was represented there by a number of the team members, and I was able to have a few informal conversations with them. After I got back home, I conducted an interview with Ben Wolfe, who actually wasn’t at the conference, but he talked to me about what the OpenMRS project does, and who is using it in the world, and where it’s going in the future. We also talked a little bit about their Google Summer of Code students. Here’s my conversation with Ben.

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