I was opportune to contribute to the Layer5 Community Handbook as a technical writer in the She Code Africa (SCA) Contributhon program 2021.
The She Code Africa Contributhon Program is a virtual open-source boot camp where ladies get the opportunity to work with open source organizations on selected projects with dedicated mentorship. The program duration is a month.
Layer5 is an open-source organization with the largest collection of service meshes and their maintainers in the world. They are also the creator and maintainer of service mesh standards and also the maker of Meshery( the service mesh management plane).
Project Topic
The project focus was to contribute to the Layer5 Community Handbook which is about the general overview of the Layer5 community.
Project Goals
The aim of the project :
Documenting a general overview for Layer5 as an organization.
Creating a structured guide for interaction across all the Layer5 projects
Editing of repetition pattern across docs
Community Bonding
From the start of the program, a channel on the Layer5 slack workspace was created for communications with the mentors. There was an onboarding call organized together with the mentors to discuss various tasks assigned alongside the different sections to work on.
Project Phase
The project is hosted on google docs, which was the official platform for documenting the handbook. To make the project organized and uniform, I created a separate draft to handle the sections assigned to me. The purpose of the community handbook is to provide an overview of the Layer5 community. It is divided into multiple sections which are :
- Introduction
- Documentation Guidelines
- Mentorship Programs
- Repository Overview
- Layer5 Teams
- Learn Layer5
- Code of Conduct
I was assigned to work on three main sections of the community handbook. For each section, I used the approved outline in documenting the content related to the section.
Outline
1) Introduction
For the introduction section, I used this outline for documenting the different parts;
- Handbook purpose
- What is Layer5
- Goals
- Joining Community
- Projects
2) Mentorship Programs
For the mentorship section, I used this outline for documenting the different programs Layer5 participated in;
- list of mentorship programs with Layer5 participation.
3) Learn Layer5
For the learn Layer5 section, I used this outline for documenting all the resources related to Layer5;
- Learn
- Events
- Slack Community
- Blog
- Connect with us
Steps in achieving the project goals
I did my research to learn more about Layer5
I gathered resources together from the Layer5 website, Layer5 Github Portfolio, and also Layer5 Blog posts
Work Done
Here are the links to the final drafts of the sections I worked on:
The completed handbook was published on the community drive as a google document, This handbook can be accessed by everyone both within and outside of the community. The final published docs can be found here.
Challenges
The Layer5 community is a large community with a large number of resources. The challenge I faced from the start of the documentation process was navigating through all the resources. Thanks to the amazing mentors, they were able to put me through with some guides and specific resources. They also assisted in reviewing my drafts for the final publication of the main project.
Experience
The program was a great experience for me, with the opportunity to work on improving Layer5 documentation. Even with the short time period, I was still able to achieve a lot. What I gained from the program:
- I was able to work with amazing people (both mentors and community members).
- I was able to improve my technical writing skills.
- I got the opportunity to work on an open-source project.
- I also became an official member of the Layer5 Community.🤗
Overall, this was an awesome opportunity for me to boost my open-source contributions and I hope to contribute more to the Layer5 documentation.
Thank you She Code Africa for this opportunity.