One of the most useful skills you get out of doing open source comes from learning to write READMEs.
Being able to describe a piece of software clearly and concisely in terms of
- what is is
- what it does
- how it does it
- why it does it that way
- how you use it
is a superpower that you will be able to use throughout your career.
@plexus I love myself a good readme, especially when it’s got some helpful screenshots getting me excited to try it out.
@plexus can’t agree enough.
Had a colleague with a cool little internal project. They refused to write a README. Couldn’t (or wouldn’t) wrap their heads around it. IIRC, the doco was a PowerPoint file jammed in with the code.
Convo went on (through email) for weeks. A few weird drafts that either said nothing or were a dump of the slides as plain text. I must have sent a dozen links to READMEs. I can only assume they refused to look at any of them. Frustrating.
Summarizing is a skill.
@plexus Very much so, yes.
I’d like to add: how you build it, since that’s often separate from using it (except for pure scripting languages that do not get installed).
Usually that just takes a few lines of commands, but if those are missing (or cannot actually be executed, because something is missing), that hurts a lot.