Greetings! For the past weeks since my last email, I have been poking around our docs and tools to determine areas that need the most help when it comes to developer documentation. I've also had some very enlightening conversations with developers and contributors about pain points and what they need for their respective projects and areas. I'm attaching a report of the status of our documentation as well as suggested plans moving forward. The TL;DR version follows.
Updating our developer documentation across the board is a task that can't be accomplished easily and within a short period of time. Given the resources we have, I'm focusing on four key areas: 1. Onboarding: The most common question new developers have is where and how to get started. We can further improve https://kde.org/develop to be a clear and definitive starting point for new developers, both internal as well as external, directing them to important pages like tutorials, projects, etc. Consequently, the TechBase and Community Wikis will also have such landing pages to help orient developers with what's needed to get started. (CC'ing Neofytos for the Onboarding team) 2. Apidocs: Focus on first updating the most used Frameworks (Tiers 1 and 2, KIO, Plasma, Phonon), adding comprehensive introductions and example code per framework. This could be an opportunity to promote Frameworks on the road to its 5th anniversary in July. Investigate potential solutions for generating more presentable and usable QML (and Javascript) API documentation. 3. Wikis: Finish moving pages to their proper wikis and sections and archive or delete old pages. Updating the tutorials and information on both wikis will take up the bulk of the work here. Keeping the pages updated will mostly require regular checkups (quarterly or release-based). 4. Per-project Docs: Plasma (including Mobile) and Kirigami are two projects that are regularly getting interested new developers and could benefit from having their docs updated. The KDE Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) team is also working to expand the existing documentation with code examples and screenshots. This is, of course, just the tip of the documentation iceberg but things I consider to be a priority to get the ball rolling. That ball will start moving in the next few days and I'm looking forward to working with the community in getting our docs sorted out. -- Regards, Juan Carlos Torres Jucato
KDE Developer Documentation Report - Status and Plans.pdf
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