Want to make a difference?

Got an urge to contribute to open source, but don’t know where to start?

Do you want to really learn about the latest developer technologies and at the same time contribute to open source? Want to contribute something that will benefit many of your piers? But just don’t now where to start?

One of the most important pieces of software, is also one that often is lacking — documentation! And sadly in a ever more fast moving world documentation often has become something of an afterthought, out of date and neglected.

Microsoft has realized this and has therefore launched a new unified we site for their technical documentation — docs.microsoft.com!

And here is where you opportunity exists, why? Well because Microsoft has made their new documentation open source, available on GitHub, enabling for everyone — just not employees to contribute via issues and pull-requests.

All contributions are important and can come in all sizes, a great way to dip your to is to fix smaller things like typos and grammar. But as there’s constantly new things coming, there’s also opportunity to contribute whole new sections of documentation.

Want to be the one that documents to the C# reference about pattern matching? Get buy off in the GitHub issue, fork repository and start hacking at pattern-matching.md!

I really like this initiative from Microsoft, previously the documentation process was so slow giving feedback left you with a feeling of being ignored — whilst now I’ve often seen pull request get reviewed and deployed same day.

That said Microsoft must keep their tech writers on board, even if they don’t do all docs anymore someone needs to review, give feedback and guide people on issues and pull-requests. Also frankly their will be areas where the community has less interest to contribute and you’ll have to pay someone to do it :)

Microsoft also need to learn how open source works, they’re getting there! but as same time the “internet-points” and social aspects are very different versus dealing with employees. Microsoft even if you choose to not merge an proposal — always be sure to say:

“Thanks for contributing”!