Documenting for Open Source

Thanks for attending my talk Documenting for Open Source at Write the Docs Portland. Slides, recording, resources and other fun stuff can be found here. The presentation is being recorded so check back later for the video!

As always, Tweet—and use the conference hashtag #writethedocs—or email me if you have questions!

Project Files

How Many Days Until Halloween? – The project that started it all! Not sure how many days until the spookiest day of the year? No worries, this webpage will do the counting for you!

Fork the project files on Github – Peak behind the code and see firsthand how this project evolved over time. Contributions are always welcome!

Presentation Slides [6 MB] – A PDF of my presentation slides can be downloaded here.

Resources

  • Hacktoberfest – Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software
  • Open Source Guides – An extensive collection of resources for individuals, communities, and companies who want to learn how to run and contribute to an open source project
  • Open Source Survey – The Open Source Survey is an open data project by GitHub and collaborators from academia, industry, and the broader open source community
  • Bridget Kromhout’s Tweet on writing docs with empathy
  • Make a Read Me – A 101 guide to creating a README
  • Contributors Covenant – A boilerplate code of conduct for open source projects
  • Keep a Changelog – One of the many ways to structure your changelog
  • Documentation Guide – A living, breathing doc about writings docs from Write the Docs

The One Where 2018 Comes To An End

via GIPHY

In the moment, it can be difficult to realize what you’ve accomplished in a year.

2018 is no different.

As the year comes to a close, I wanted to reflect on everything that I accomplished—or didn’t—in the past 365 days.

Continue reading “The One Where 2018 Comes To An End”

I Cried After Completing my Nanodegree And It Was Worth It—My Udacity Journey

The Start of the Journey

It’s hard to think that almost a year ago I was applying for a Nanodegree. I was not on the hunt for scholarships or looking to enroll in a bootcamp or nanodegree. I saw the opportunity on social media and almost did not apply. Afterall, I thought, I knew how to code—I had been learning to code for years! I was mostly self-taught but I was employed as an email developer. There were people with similar backgrounds as me who were struggling to find something—anything—in tech. I thought that I didn’t deserve the scholarship and this was before I even applied!

Continue reading “I Cried After Completing my Nanodegree And It Was Worth It—My Udacity Journey”

The One with the Color Picker in Chrome DevTools

I was today years old when I learned that there is a color picker available within Chrome DevTools.

I was making tweaks to the homepage of my website. I use Bootstrap with some custom styling which was making for some weird spacing on larger screen sizes. I was debugging where the extra height was coming from by adding obtrusive background colors to all div elements.

Usually, I inspect an element and double-click it’s hex value in the styles panel to manually make a change. By mistake, I clicked the small color square next to the hex value and—whoa—a wild color picker has appeared!

Example of using Chrome DevTools to change a hex value
An example of using Chrome DevTools to change the hex value of a CSS property value

Pretty cool right?

In playing around with the tool some more, I see that you can use an eyedropper to pick out new colors, toggle the color values from RGA, hex, and hsla and even pick colors from the material design color palette.

This is great news for someone like me who wants needs to debug in the browser or wants to test new colors without opening up a text editor.

Here’s Google’s documentation on the tool and other CSS Reference features.

Chrome DevTools | CSS Reference