I've Been Contributing to Ruby Documentation

Burdette Lamar - Jan 1 '22 - - Dev Community

tl;dr? -- Cut to The Chase

Having spent 40 years in the software industry -- as a documentor, developer, and test automator -- I can't see that any of the work I did, however relevant at the time, survives: Nothing beside remains.

Well, it's now almost five years since I got retired. For the first three of those, I worked on projects of my own, blogged, posted here, and contributed some to Ruby's spec project. As for the posts to my blog and posts here, it's amazing how quickly the search engines learn to ignore your posts and cast them into the darkness-- think red shift.

Then in September 2019 I came to my senses, and started doing something that will last: contributing enhanced RDoc for the Ruby project itself.

The Chase

So far, in the Ruby documentation I've:

  • Added "What's Here" sections for about 20 classes and modules.
  • Re-written the introductory material for about 15 classes and modules.
  • Re-written entirely the methods documentation for about 15 classes.
  • Added separate documents for bsearch, dig, and implicit conversion.

From time to time I'll post here, linking to some of these changes.

Happy new year!

[UPDATE: Should have added -- could not have done without the close support of many reviewers, especially Jeremy Evans -- who prevented my worst mistakes.]

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