cypherhoodlum on Nostr: The onboarding documentation for casual contributions needs to start from "what is ...

The onboarding documentation for casual contributions needs to start from "what is version control, what is the concept of a pull request, what are the ways to contact the devs and who is the dev to contact and for what?" Then the documentation must declare the process of setting up the development environment step-by-step and how to resolve the most common problems during the setup. The documentation must lay out the structure of the project in a way that's approachable enough to not scare a new dev but informative and detailed enough to be useful. Then they need to know exactly where the project might need help with and how to get their changes merged. If the changes need to pass some automatic tests the new dev needs to know how to run those in advance and do the process themself. But when the project matures this documentation needs to be kept up to date which might be the hardest part. This is not simple and very few open source projects actually have the proper guides in their repo. Btcpayserver is one of the few who have done most of these steps right.