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Burdette Lamar
Burdette Lamar

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I've Been Contributing to Ruby Documentation

tl;dr? -- Cut to The Chase

Having spent 40 years in the software industry -- as a documentor, developer, and test automator -- I can't see that any of the work I did, however relevant at the time, survives: Nothing beside remains.

Well, it's now almost five years since I got retired. For the first three of those, I worked on projects of my own, blogged, posted here, and contributed some to Ruby's spec project. As for the posts to my blog and posts here, it's amazing how quickly the search engines learn to ignore your posts and cast them into the darkness-- think red shift.

Then in September 2019 I came to my senses, and started doing something that will last: contributing enhanced RDoc for the Ruby project itself.

The Chase

So far, in the Ruby documentation I've:

  • Added "What's Here" sections for about 20 classes and modules.
  • Re-written the introductory material for about 15 classes and modules.
  • Re-written entirely the methods documentation for about 15 classes.
  • Added separate documents for bsearch, dig, and implicit conversion.

From time to time I'll post here, linking to some of these changes.

Happy new year!

[UPDATE: Should have added -- could not have done without the close support of many reviewers, especially Jeremy Evans -- who prevented my worst mistakes.]

Top comments (3)

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beeburrt profile image
B. Burt • Edited

I was hoping for more description here. Thank you for all of the work you've done.

Some of us are new and trying to figure out how to do these kinds of things.

There are a few little formatting errors here and there in the Ruby docs that I want to fix. So I came here looking for some instruction on how to go about it.

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supairish profile image
Chris Irish

So awesome, thank you for your contributions!

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burdettelamar profile image
Burdette Lamar

Thanks, it's good to contribute.