Want to join the Rust docs team?
One of Rustās major goals this year is to provide mentoring at all levels of the project. This is a goal Iām very on-board with. Thereās lots of ways to get involved with Rust, but Iād like to talk about the bit Iām most involved in: documentation.
Thereās many ways to contribute to Rustās docs. Some people contribute occasional PRs, some people end up contributing a lot. No matter what your interest, Iād like to help. But before I get into those details, why should someone get involved with documentation? I have my own reasons, but I also have a pitch for you:
Working on documentation is a fantastic way to learn something in a deeper way.
In order to document something, you have to understand it, even if only a little bit! Itās a good excuse to dig into the details. And Iāve found that many people are eager to help explain something to you in return for you writing that down and synthesizing it into documentation.
If that sounds intriguing to you, letās talk! Thereās a number of different ways to do this, and Iām interested generally in helping anyone work on Rustās documentation, in any form. However, if you donāt have something in mind, I do have a suggestion.
Back in October of 2015, I made a big GitHub issue to track giving the whole standard library documentation a once-over. I then made sub-issues for each main module. Slowly, myself and others have been knocking them out, but thereās still a number of issues open.
Today, I went through all of the remaining ones, and made fine-grained bullet points of what needs to be done. Iāll admit that some of them may not be as explicit as they could be, but it at least gives a starting point to talk about. Hereās all the sections that are currently open:
Some of the work that needs to be done is very small: add a link here, re-word a sentence there. Other bits are large; āthis whole thing needs re-written.ā
So hereās my pitch to you: have you ever wanted to learn a bit more about Rust? Do any of those names sound interesting to you? Maybe youāve wanted to learn a bit more about threads in Rust. Check out that āthreadā issue above, poke around, learn some Rust, and then letās make the docs better! We can work together on the issues, through email, or on IRC. Whatever works. Maybe youāll find it as addicting as I do. And I find that people who are non-experts write way better docs than experts. So donāt worry about that!
Worst case, youāll have learned a bit of the standard library a bit better, and thatās always a good thing, too.