News
AWS Open Sources Documentation, Invites Community Edits
Amazon Web Services has open sourced a huge amount of documentation, placing it on the GitHub platform and inviting developers to contribute with bug fixes, edits and so on via pull requests.
While AWS had previously open sourced AWS SDK developer guides, it has just added more than 138 developer and user guides, all in repos found under the awsdocs organization.
Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr invited developers to become involved in helping the core team maintain and improve the documentation via the usual source code contribution process involving forks and pull requests.
"You can fix bugs, improve code samples (or submit new ones), add detail, and rewrite sentences and paragraphs in the interest of accuracy or clarity," Barr said in a post last week. "You can also look at the commit history in order to learn more about new feature and service launches and to track improvements to the documents."
AWS documentation teams will try to respond to pull requests within 48 hours, deciding whether to accept them, reject them or contact the submitter for more information.
"As is the case with most open source projects, a steady stream of focused, modest-sized pull requests is preferable to the occasional king-sized request with dozens of edits inside," Barr said.
The "Amazon Web Services - Documentation" organization on GitHub lists 148 repositories, ranging from the AWS CloudFormation User Guide to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams docs. Top languages used include Python, Java, Go and C#. Seven developers are listed under the People section.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.