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Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?

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Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?

#51
If you want to get into:

  * Discussing technical issues with developers.
  * Learning about new technologies.
Check out http://www.codetriage.com. It will also help give you the tools you'll need to:

  * Explain new technology to customers.
  * Simplify technical issues for customers.

Pick a few open source tools that your company uses like http://www.codetriage.com/rails/rails and start reading issues. Eventually you'll learn enough to start helping out.

Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?

#52

If you're into healthcare compliance you can certainly checkout our docs repos (simply filter by docs) http://catalyzeio.github.io/ We're always looking for edits/feedback!

Stack of pull requests coming your way :-)

(I was having some bad dreams, and apparently proofreading healthcare documents was what I needed to shake it. Thanks!)

Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?

#53
post #15

Accessibility, accessibility, accessibility. Are there - Link skips - Dyslexia-friendly typography (no justification, no hyphens, preferably fonts with distinct glyphs) - A colour scheme useable and legible to the huge population of colour-blind people - Screenreader-friendly HTML - Closed caption for video - or just transcripts A lot of fancy-pants projects are absolutely amateurish when it comes to this, and it onl…

On this, I've seen job postings on HN asking for all these crazy advanced front-end skills that don't have alt-text for their image-text company logo.

Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?

#54
I work at DuckDuckGo. Our most popular open source project is DuckDuckHack: http://duckduckhack.com/ Developers leverage code, APIs, wikis, etc. to answer searches (across a broad range of topics) in few or zero clicks. What we call, "Instant Answers."

The nature of the project only works well with the involvement of non-developers in that the best Instant Answers are made by subject-matter experts across a variety of fields. Suggesting ideas, finding great sources, and the overall experience of the IA are all better if coming from someone who really wants to improve searches for that topic. https://duck.co/help/community/contributing

Let me know if you're interested in getting involved--any time :)

Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?

#55

With your skillset, you could be doing invaluable work by writing documentation. The world is full of good Free software that is essentially orphaned, because the documentation is practically useless. Many moribund projects could be revitalised with little more than a concise description of what the software does, why you might choose it over the alternatives, and how to get started. Other projects suffer from dreadf…

I have a similar skillset to OP, and I was brought on board to write/improve the documentation for http://www.fluentd.org/

I'm now unable to devote nearly as much time to the project as before, so there's definitely a need in the project right now. The tool is used by AWS, Google Cloud Platform, LINE, Nintendo and others, so it's something that would have wide reach right away.

Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?

#58
As the maintainer of a very small project (probably only 1000 users at its peak), a non-technical person would have been able to help me a lot. Because it was a one-person only affair, I had only so much time. I probably spent half of it writing and updating documentation, and building and testing installs. I ended up having very little time to code and since there were features that I absolutely needed for me, I often just jammed them in as best I could. Just having time to concentrate only on code would have helped me a lot. Also, it might sound strange, but if you want a project to gain traction outside of your little world you need marketing. I would have loved to have someone who could write a blog post or two explaining why the project was different than all of the other similar ones around. Doubling or trebling the user base may have attracted another programmer to help with the technical side. The website I built essentially contained only the documentation and while I feel happy with the quality of that documentation, it absolutely lacked anything that would attract new users. Building a screencast showing the killer features would also have been incredibly useful. It was all on my TODO list, but I just lacked time to do it because I barely had time to code the features I wanted.

As you mention, user interface spikes would have been fantastic and saved me huge amounts of time in experimentation.

The thing on your list which I personally would not have found useful Planning Poker. I actually did make sprints and wrote stories and even tracked my velocity. But in the end, you wind up doing demand-based work. Like I said, I wrote the system for me and there were just things I needed done. Those things took top priority no matter what. And with a lack of time, I very rarely got off that list. Even in a large project, I don't think you are going to get much different: coders are in it for scratching their own itch. They will self-prioritise their work and there won't be too much difficulty coordinating it.

Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?

#59
You need to find open source projects that suit your interest and you have a genuine passion in seeing them succeed. Look beyond the highly successful ones, and look for projects that have a reasonable community + momentum but are not very famous. There is a lot to be done for such projects

Try https://github.com/explore

Plug: Checkout our project https://github.com/frappe/erpnext

Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?

#60
As others have said, your skillset is very valuable for all sorts of things. For example as a community manager, or as a documentation writer.

I would love to get your help with writing documentation for the Phusion Passenger application server. We're currently overhauling our documentation (https://github.com/phusion/passenger_library). But as a developer who has been working on this project for years, I feel that it's getting increasingly hard for me to understand how my users think. I've become "too good" if you can call it that, so sometimes I struggle to understand what problems users would have, or what they wouldn't understand. Your skillset would help a lot here!

Please contact me at hongli@phusion.nl if you're interested.

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