 Hi everyone, my name is Alexandra Nikonrova and I am a technical writer in Red Hat for slightly less than three years. Today I want to tell you about how to contribute to open source without writing any code. Let's dive back, 30 years back when on August 6, 1991 at computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee published a first ever website. This website was about the World Wide Web Project which described the web and how to use it. So basically it was their documentation. And he fought for it that it stays open source and it could grow even the company he was working at, wanted to patent it. What is open source and why do you need to participate in its life? I will talk about open source in terms of software. In this case, open source software is software with its source code open to everyone which anyone can view, modify and improve. Of course, this person must know programming language, algorithm, structure of the project and so on and so on. Why open source versus proprietary software? I would say security reason, I will tell you why. There must be, there might be an argue but still to my opinion, having open source using open source software, you have better control. Even if you have some bug or whatever in the code, you can fix it. You can make it, yeah. In a proprietary software, you don't have this opportunity and it is more visible for you how the software operate with the data, with sensitive data if you feed this data to this software. And in a property, in terms of proprietary software, you have to rely on the provider of the software. So you don't have control of that. The other reason proprietary software is pricing. I will share my personal experience a little bit. I am fond of photography and the first thing which comes to my mind, came to my mind was Photoshop. But back then it was so extremely expensive. I couldn't afford it simply. It's an amazing software, but yeah, back then it was very pricey. So I did some research and I found GIMP. GIMP is amazing tool as well. It has all the tools I need for my hobby, for my needs. So I went for open source and I'm pretty content and happy with it. And with all these amazing features and accessibility of open source software, there are still some pitfalls and one of them unfortunately documentation. And I will tell you why. Well, programmers are the smartest people in the world and they can add a feature, they can describe the feature actually, but it will be something like this calls this function or uses this library and it should look like that, but it's too technical or programmer may not describe it at all. So add some comment in the code and you may not need, don't know how to read the code. So, and you don't need to know, so you will be spaced out and confused. Maybe you will figure out how to use this software, maybe not, but while you will be figuring out how to use the software, you will spend a lot of time to find a decent solution, how to solve your problem using this particular software. So that's, and this open source software is open source projects, usually supported by open source communities because usually one person cannot write a good code, cannot test it properly and yeah, probably cannot add understandable documentation. So basically in open source communities we have developers, they are writing codes, they fixing bugs and they are a source of ultimate technical knowledge. We have users, users are using software and occasionally can report a bug if they find any, but how, how can you use, how the user can use this software without proper description? Because of course user can learn by trying everything but that's time consuming as I already told. So that's why we have technical writers and technical writers are basically a missing piece between a developer and a user and they are making software usable. As a technical writer, you don't have to understand the code but unlike most of the users because users may not be a part of the community and just using this software like I found it somewhere for solving the problems. So unlike those users, you have access to developers and you can ask them for better explanation and developers in my experience usually helps because it's almost impossible to understand that it's almost impossible for a user to achieve some results by using their software. And yeah, in this case, your help as a technical writer is really, really important. Main question, where to start from? A very simple way is to start with your familiar software, the one you're already using. If you struggle now and then with something, it's a good sign that software is like in documentation. There are other option, you can find the project on the GitHub or GitLab with the majority of open source project allocated. Those are popular platforms that store the code and other project related information and allow collaborate on it. And the third option which I used is participate in some events like Google season of docs. In this event, Google supports open source organization by inviting technical writers from all over the world to contribute new documentation or improve already existing documentation. Me personally, I participated in this event last year, 2020. I chose Wireshark project. I applied for it and was accepted as a technical writer. And I had to document 37 menu items from scratch. They were undocumented. The documentation did not exist at all at that time. That was quite a challenge because, you know, Wireshark is a very powerful tool for analyzing network and a lot of people are using it, including developers, network administrators. Like basically a lot of people who are interested what's going on in their network using something like that and Wireshark is pretty popular. Even with its popularity documentation, a little bit of mess there, unfortunately. And I got lucky with this project because they were using similar tool chain to the work I do for my full-time job. They have GitLab, they store their project on GitLab and the documentation is written in ASCII doctor. Other than that, I had hard time. Some information was outdated or did not exist at all. People who contribute to that project, they are living all over the world and they obviously have their full-time jobs and lives. So sometimes it took me several days to get a reply or even find a proper person to ask. And searching on the web was also a struggle because some technologies are quite unpopular or simply old and don't have much description on the internet. Besides that, I had to work my eight hours shift per day, my full-time job, and refocusing between something completely different. It's not an easy process sometimes. But I finished the project successfully and I'm pretty happy with the results. And yeah, this is actually a picture I found of also drawing a little bit. This is a picture I was struggling to document TLS in my shot. It's my fun art for this project. Yeah, I will share a little bit of facts about Google season of dogs. So in 2020, there were 87 projects accepted and only 78 of them were successful. So roughly 9% of the project failed. So that's a good result actually. 9% it's not a huge chunk, but still this 9% of documentation is missing and users struggling with this software. And that's actually might be your chance to contribute to open source without writing code. Yeah, you can take this opportunity. And to sum up, we are surrounded by open source and we might not even realize that. For example, World Wide Web, how often do you admire this project? It feels like granted, isn't it? Doesn't it? So yeah. And also user writer can easily start contributing too. I contributed to Wireshark project and it actually benefited me as I improved my writing skills. It's my profession and I improved my technical knowledge. And I helped the project grow and as well as I helped myself grow. So you can do that too, I'm sure. If you do have any questions, now it's time to ask. Presentation, I mean, I had a lot about Google Season of Dogs but today I got some more deeper insights because really great. And you didn't sound like a new speaker at all. Oh, thank you. That's a compliment, thanks a lot. Anyway, if you don't have any questions or you have, yeah, sorry, I will share it once again. I'll be sharing a link to the breakout room. Yeah, if you don't have any questions, I provided some links to Wireshark what I was talking about. It's a Google Season of Dogs project. I wrote a small article about what I did during this project. If you are interested in documenting things and we are using ASCII Doctor, this is the page for it. And if any questions, you can contact me via my email and I will try to answer if I would be able to. Other than that, thanks a lot for your attention and I wish you enjoy the rest of the conference and the rest of the day and the weekend is in front of us, so thanks a lot. Thanks a lot.