Wednesday 

Room 6 

10:20 - 11:20 

(UTC+01

Talk (60 min)

The Art of Documentation and Readme.md

The Readme is becoming essential to successful Open Source projects. The Readme is a gateway to welcoming new users and potential contributors. It defines the tone of the project, how to get started, and most importantly, the aim.

Open Source

While many Open Source projects have amazing code-bases, the Readme and documentation are letting them down and as a result, they are losing influence and opportunities for adoption and feedback.

In this talk, Ben uses his expertise in building an Interactive Learning Platform to highlight The Art of Documentation and the Readme file. The aim of the talk is to help open source contributors understand how small changes to their documentation approach can have an enormous impact on how users get started.

Ben will discuss:

  • How to create engaging documentation
  • Defining technical details in an accessible way
  • Building documentation that encourages users to get started
  • How to manage documentation and keep it up-to-date and relevant

In the end, attendees will have an understanding of how to build beautiful, useful documentation. This will be backed by examples from some of the best open-source projects.

Ben Hall

Ben created Katacoda (Katacoda.com), an interactive learning environment for software engineers which was acquired by O'Reilly Media in 2019.