Back in September I wrote a post called “Advanced Rails Documentation”, which talked about there being a dearth of advanced Ruby on Rails documentation about the place.
Since then, I’ve been talking with a lot of people in the Ruby world and that’s changed my opinion of what’s truly needed. It’s not so much the advanced documentation that’s needed, but more on the intermediate parts of Rails such as using application templates / builders, or even an Engines guide for when 3.1 drops. Piotr Sarnacki has been doing some seriously awesome work on those.
Another example, Railscamp was this weekend just gone. It was bloody great. During my time spent coding at it, I worked on investigating and documenting the ActionDispatch::Routing::Mapper class, in particular, most of the options for the methods such as namespace and resources. If you see anything wrong with the documentation of these methods, I’m probably your man to ask.
This is the kind of work that I’d be doing if I received sponsorship prior to January: working on guides and general documentation for Rails and its ecosystem. If you want examples of my work, you need not look any further than the blogs I’ve written here, as well as Rails 3 in Action, which is more a beginner-focussed text.
There was a drive just like this back in 2006 and that was a resounding success. But back then, Rails was at 1.1.6! Rails has come quite a long way since then, and I think it’s time that we had some quality, community-sponsored documentation going on. I want to help the community, and I think this is the best way I can be of most use.
The intention of this post is to purely gauge the interest in a project like this. I’ll write another post during December with a link to a Pledgie (or similar). I’m more than happy to do it, but a man’s gotta eat. So my final question is: would you donate to a project like this, and how much (or what) would you donate?