By Rebecca Stobaugh.
We’ve reached the end of Google’s Season of Docs, and we’ve accomplished a lot in the past three months. My initial proposal was to work on three sections of the manual, and we have far exceeded our goal, managing to make changes to twelve different sections of the documentation. The majority of the work I’ve done has consisted of cleaning up grammatical errors and improving sentence structure. I have also added a style guide to the wiki, which should help standardize future changes to the documentation. The style guide can be found in the “HPX Source Code Structure and Coding Standards” wiki document under the section “Documentation Style Guide”. For a complete list of my pull requests during Season of Docs, please see here. To view my changes to the wiki, please see here.
There are also some ongoing projects I’d like to discuss. LSU has offered me an assistantship to continue working on the documentation after Season of Docs ends. Thus, some of the work I started under Season of Docs has been left unfinished, with the understanding I will complete it at a later date. The open pull requests for the “miscellaneous” and “local to remote” sections of the documentation need some additional work to resolve conflicts before merging. In addition, the style guide I have created is still in its infancy. I wanted to go ahead and address the most common standardization issues I have encountered, but I plan to expand the guide at a later date. All edits I have made during the Season of Docs program will be clearly marked as such; all future pull requests you see from me will not be associated with Season of Docs.
On a personal note, working as a technical writer for Season of Docs has been a very rewarding experience. Adapting to both new software and new tech jargon in such a short period of time has been a challenge, but it’s helped strengthen my problem-solving skills (and I’ve picked up a couple new computer shortcuts!). Most importantly, I foresee this experience improving my competence as a college composition teacher. As incoming students become more invested in STEM programs, in accordance with new reports released by the best trading platforms UK has to offer, composition programs are also becoming increasingly interdisciplinary; moreover, there is an increasing demand for writing courses that focus on digital media and technical writing. Thus, having a strong background in writing for digital media will help me better meet the needs of my students.