GSoD 2020 - Documentation for New Developers: Priorities for phase II

Hi All, @herbert24 @jennifer @grace @burke

I have finished the draft documentation for the first phase of this project. I am currently working on revising the draft based on community input and enter them into wiki. Phase I is focused on setting up the system, producing the first module, and introducing workflow.

The drafts are here:

Getting Started as a Developer

Contributing as a Developer

The list of files revised are here:

Project progress report

There is one month left for GSoD 2020, I want the time for this last month used well. For phase II, I need community input on:

  • nominating additional files that should be revised and included in the project
  • how to improve the current “Getting started as a developer” hierarchy on OpenMRS wiki? Such as items to add, items to remove, or items to move to other places on wiki.

Wiki_getting_started_TOC

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Are these two pages still useful ? Can they be removed?

Generate Test Case Plugin

OpenMRS Dependency Installer

Is Developer swim lane still open ?

let me get here after the review of all your works

Will you have some time tomorrow and we pick up on a call

@dkayiwa what do you think? And are there any other pages that you or @ibacher would recommend Rainbow try to improve?

Please remove them!

I think it’s “open” in the sense that it’s probably still there, but it’s not actively used.

This might be a bit too much of a project, but getting started with microfrontends would be an important thing to get documented, if we could. Perhaps @florianrappl could provide @rainbow with some guidance on that?

Also, looking at that document tree, I think a number of the pages under “Maven” probably don’t belong in a “Getting Started Guide”, e.g., “Setting up a Maven proxy server” (this is quite a “special case” subject), “Updating Mavenized modules to compile against OpenMRS 1.8.0” (this is no longer relevant), “Usage Poll”.

I also think (and this is getting into dreaming and not something I expect out of the current GSoD effort), but getting some more task-focused documentation into the developer guide is a good place. Things like: How do I add fields to the registration page? How to I add things to the patient chart? How do I create a new button on the home page? Would be good to have and hopefully give new developers more of a sense of accomplishment than the “here’s a backend module that doesn’t really do anything” instructions we currently have. (All of these exist in one form or another on the Wiki, but it’s a little obtuse to find if you don’t know what you’re looking for).

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I love this idea @ibacher. We’ve had other volunteers in the MFE squad ask for exactly something like this. Florian and Brandon sent me some ideas that I was going to put into a confluence page under our MFE project information wiki. I could set that up and @rainbow could link to that. The teaser wording could be something like “If you’re interested in contributing to our new frontend development project using microfrontend architecture, and in learning more about modern frontend development frameworks like ReactJS, and rapidly contributing to user-facing features using an established Design System, check out our How to Get Started with Microfrontends guidance here (links to Wiki page).”

Kudos & thank you Ian for the excellent feedback for Rainbow! :pray:

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These are all great ideas!

As we think about expanding our “Getting Started” guidance into the frontend and even QA, I’d like to make sure that we’re hearing from @madhens’ about her ideas around the Volunteer Guides - which are really all about guiding newbies and existing members to the right places for getting started and contributing to our community - whether this is Platform development, QA, microfrontends, infrastructure, etc. I think she has a lucid chart started.

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@rainbow it also helps to make the getting started as a developer page shorter by replacing the list of community priority and introductory tickets with links.

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Yeah happy to assist here! Just message me in Slack if you need some guidance and we can get started.

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I’ll be presenting what I have today, so hopefully that will give everyone a good idea of what I have thus far and will importantly give people the chance to comment and point out where it can be changed/improved!

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And our Documentation Team meeting is starting now on uberconference.com/openmrs. Please join us!

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Thank everyone for the input. They are really helpful! :pray:

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That’s done. In the draft, those tickets are put into another document called “Contributing as a Developer”

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@florianrappl I’d love to find a time connect and talk about this. Please let me know your availability. I am in EST time zone, I can talk at about 7pm week day.

I am very much interested! Even to just have a start. I am also open to keep working beyond GSoD2020.

I need help in producing code for the Hello World module, as a part of Creating Your First Module. The current one https://devmanual.openmrs.org/en/Case_study/yourFirstModule.html does not produce any out put. It’s a hello world module without “Hello world!”.

I love the idea of producing visible results to encourage interest and boost confidence for newbies!

Hi @rainbow will this be good for you UI Framework Step By Step Tutorial - Documentation - OpenMRS Wiki