Contribution in brief
Recognizing the significance of well-crafted documentation for software, I focused on improving the documentation for HTTPie, a developer-focused tool. I noticed several areas that could benefit from clarification, reorganization, and consistent terminology usage. Keeping in mind the Google developer documentation guidelines, I took the initiative to rephrase and rearrange sections of the documentation, aiming to enhance clarity, simplicity, and accuracy. By addressing these aspects, my goal was to improve the overall quality of the HTTPie documentation and make life of developers easy.
- Link to Pull requests
- Tools used: Git, GitHub
What’s HTTPie ?
It is a command-line HTTP client designed to simplify testing, debugging, and interacting with APIs & HTTP servers.
- Tech stack: Python
My contribution
Problem
I am of the opinion that a software is as good as it’s documentaion. This is due to the fact that developers consider documentation as the source of truth. As time evolves, we may have other materials like Stackoverflow, reddit, blog posts etc. While my opinion is not applicable for all kind of softwares, it is more releavant for softwares focused on developers (like HTTPie). For example, for Microsoft Word I feel that the software is as good as the User Interface (UI) is.
For developer focused softwares, it is important to make the documentation as simple, lucid, unambiguous and error free as possible. I happened to use httpie for a project and visited it’s documentaion website. I observed that some sentences required more clarification, some sections required reorganisation, there was need to use terms consistently and many more. Overall there were multiple scopes for improvement.
Solution
I was familiar with the Google developer documentation guidelines prior to my contribution. The guidelines provide useful tips to write better documentation. I made use of these guidelines to rephrase and reorganise some sections of the HTTPie documentaion to bring more clarity & consistency.