Comment by giancarlostoro
3 days ago
I forget the episode its been years but the Talk Python podcast had someone I think from the Django team mention tips on contributing to open source and one of them was start by volunteering to document things, most devs dont do it or want to do it. It forces you to know and understand the codebase and by the time you want to contribute more you know the library better.
I actually don’t encourage this. If you find broken docs then contributing a fix is good.
However, writing docs as the starting point for someone’s entry to a project doesn’t produce good results much of the time. You need someone who is more familiar with the project to write the docs. Having the docs written by someone new to the project can lead to some really frustrating docs.
This is even more true now that projects attract junior devs who want to build their resumes and think that documenting can be done by pointing Claude Code at the codebase and demanding it write some docs.
It also encourages bad behavior from devs who think they’re doing a favor for new contributors by leaving the documentation as an exercise for someone else.