Simply Tidying up Documentation

I find myself reading documentation in three main situations: getting started with something new, checking the details of something I’ve used before, and when trying to debug something that isn’t working. When I’m getting started with something, or when I’m stuck on something, documentation is something to help guide a new, possibly frustrated human towards more understanding. So when I come across documentation saying “just do this” or “simply do that” and I’ve already tried that thing, it’s quite frustrating.

So, last month, the excellent Emma Barnes (who has a website to dedicated to this very problem) tweeted out examples of these documentation anti-patterns in the Rails docs. So, in the spirit of giving back, let’s see if we can contribute some PRs to remove this sort of language from the Rails guides to make them cleaner and less frustrating! More details on our website: http://scotrug.org/2019/12/08/giving-back-simply-tidying-up-documentation.html