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Google Season of Docs 2021 and Layer5

      What is Layer5 Community?

      While small, the Layer5 community represents the largest collection of service mesh projects and their maintainers in the world. We build projects to provide learning environments, deployment and operational best practices, performance benchmarks, create documentation, share networking opportunities, and more. Our shared commitment to the open source spirit pushes Layer5 projects forward. New members are always welcome.

      Is it Open Source?

      Layer5 projects are open source software. Anyone can download, use, work on, and share it with others. It's built on principles like collaboration, globalism, and innovation. Layer5 projects are distributed under the terms of Apache v2.

      Google Season of Docs

      Google Season of Docs gives technical writers an opportunity to work with open source projects. Layer5 is participating in the Season of Docs in 2020. See below for a list of project ideas.

Goals

    Our goal is to have helpful, consistent, and integrated tutorials for contributors, and readers of API reference docs.
  • - Use the [Swaggo] to generate the API Endpoint documentation.
  • - Use any open-source training track tool to create tutorial for Meshery and performance management.
  • - Update the contribution documentation and create an user guide for Meshery.

What you'll learn

    A writer who takes on this project will learn:
  • - How to work with stakeholders in open source projects
  • - How to work with different open-source tools to create training tutorials
  • - How to work with different service meshes & service mesh architecture
  • - How to create and render beautiful API docs

Project Ideas

The following is a list of project ideas for Layer5's participation in Google Season of Docs.

Goal: Create the world’s service mesh playground.

Meshery’s genesis is that of helping teach people about service mesh technology and enabling to operate this type of cloud native infrastructure confidently. The proposed project is aimed at furthering this mission with interactive API documentation connected to a service mesh learning playground (a running instance of Meshery). This project sits squarely in the crosshairs of our purpose - both for Meshery and Layer5.

The project’s scope

User Tutorials
We will create a new set of interactive documentation for Meshery users to both learn how to use Meshery, but also confidently adopt and operate any service mesh. We have a number of community volunteers lined up and committed to collaboration on the creation of this service mesh playground. The technical writer will collaborate with other engineers, working with Swagger and Docusaurus.
Work that is out-of-scope for this project:
- Creation of the Open API specification for Meshery
- Deployment of Docusarous
- Visual design of the site

We will bring support from the Meshery CI WG, provide a full-time visual and user experience designer and well as three dedicated core maintainers of Meshery. We have one strong technical writing candidate for this project, and estimate that this work will take six months to complete. We will support this technical writer and prioritize any dependencies on the project or community that they may have.

Measuring project success

  • To measure success, we will track:
  • The number of new API playground users (quantitative - tracked by the system)
  • The number of repeat visits of the same users (quantitative - tracked by the system)
  • The number of failed attempts to invoke an API (signifies poor documentation) (quantitative - tracked by the system)
  • Feedback from users on how intuitive the documentation is (qualitative - tracked through user polls)

We would consider the project successful if, after publication of the new API documentation

  • The total count of performance tests run by Meshery increases by 10% (see the current count on https://meshery.io)
  • The new number of new Meshery users increases by 20% (currently at ~1,000 users)

Program Maintainers