Asklemmy

44135 readers

681 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

155

If you don't have coding skills, why don't you help foss software by making it more user friendly instead? (lemmy.giftedmc.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

115 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Disclaimer

Not trying to blame anyone here. I‘m just taking an idea I‘ve read and spinning it further:

Intro

A lot of people use free open source software (foss), Linux being one of them. But a lot less actually help make this software. If I ask them why, they always say „I don’t have the coding skills!“.

Maybe its worth pointing out that you don‘t need them. In a lot of cases it’s better to not have any so you can see stuff with a „consumer view“.

In that situation you can file issues on github and similar places. You can write descriptions that non technical people can understand. You can help translate and so on, all depending on your skills.

Other reasons?

I‘d really like to know so the foss community can talk about making it worthwile for non coders to participate.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] brygphilomena 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Technical Writer is a skill. It's a fairly well paid one too.

Being able to make good documentation is hard.

User Experience (UX), user interface (UI), and graphic design are all also surprisingly difficult. Much of which is integrally tied to the code.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I came here to say something similar.

Just writing documentation alone, is a skill worthy of a full-time job! Of course, there'd be people who can volunteer their time to do that, but without someone with such skill at least taking a look and making sure it's understandable to someone who's got no idea what's going on? Let's just say that open source software help documentation is filled with such examples.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I probably should think about taking money for it but making descriptions and manuals is just something I like to do. And there are a lot of people who also do this but dont call it „technical writing“. Often it is things like doing glossars or explaining abbreviations. That helps a lot.