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If you don't have coding skills, why don't you help foss software by making it more user friendly instead? (lemmy.giftedmc.com)

submitted 11 months ago by haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Disclaimer

Not trying to blame anyone here. I‘m just taking an idea I‘ve read and spinning it further:

Intro

A lot of people use free open source software (foss), Linux being one of them. But a lot less actually help make this software. If I ask them why, they always say „I don’t have the coding skills!“.

Maybe its worth pointing out that you don‘t need them. In a lot of cases it’s better to not have any so you can see stuff with a „consumer view“.

In that situation you can file issues on github and similar places. You can write descriptions that non technical people can understand. You can help translate and so on, all depending on your skills.

Other reasons?

I‘d really like to know so the foss community can talk about making it worthwile for non coders to participate.

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[–] brygphilomena@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Technical Writer is a skill. It's a fairly well paid one too.

Being able to make good documentation is hard.

User Experience (UX), user interface (UI), and graphic design are all also surprisingly difficult. Much of which is integrally tied to the code.

[–] megane_kun@lemm.ee 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I came here to say something similar.

Just writing documentation alone, is a skill worthy of a full-time job! Of course, there'd be people who can volunteer their time to do that, but without someone with such skill at least taking a look and making sure it's understandable to someone who's got no idea what's going on? Let's just say that open source software help documentation is filled with such examples.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah, I probably should think about taking money for it but making descriptions and manuals is just something I like to do. And there are a lot of people who also do this but dont call it „technical writing“. Often it is things like doing glossars or explaining abbreviations. That helps a lot.