Linux Foundation 2021 Program Timeline
Full-Time Terms:
- Spring Term: March 1st - May 31st
- mentorships available on LFX Mentorship: Jan 15th, 2021
- applications open: Jan 15th - Feb 12th (4 weeks)
- application review/admission decisions/HR paperwork: Feb 15th - Feb 26th
- Summer Term: June 1st - August 31st
- mentorships available on LFX Mentorship: April 15th, 2021
- applications open: April 15th - May 14th (4 weeks)
- application review/admission decisions/HR paperwork: May 17th - May 31st
- Fall Term: September 1st - Nov 30th
- mentorships available on LFX Mentorship: July 15th, 2021
- applications open: July 15th - August 12th (4 weeks)
- application review/admission decisions/HR paperwork: August 12th - August 31st
Program Administrators and Mentors
- Lee Calcote (@leecalcote)
- Abishek Kumar (@kumarabd)
- Utkarsh Srivastava (@utkarsh-pro)
2021 Project Details
Project: API Docs for Meshery’s Service Mesh Patterns Playground - Layer5
About Layer5 and its projects
The Layer5 community represents the largest collection of service mesh projects and their maintainers in the world. Our inclusive and diverse community stewards projects to provide learning environments, create and implement cloud native industry standards, deployment and operational best practices, benchmarks and abstractions, and more. Our pay-it-forward mentality with every contributor (mentee or not) is a shared commitment by all maintainers (and MeshMates - contributor onboarding buddies) to the open source spirit that pushes Layer5 projects like Meshery forward. New members are always welcome.
About Meshery
Meshery is the open source, service mesh management plane for enabling the adoption, operation, and management of any service mesh and their workloads. There are many service meshes available. Software-defined networking is difficult to understand. Meshery’s aim is to make the power of the network available to the rest of us.
About our Community
Layer5 is all about its community of contributors. We have designed an onboarding program customized to meet newcomers where they’re at and developed an onboarding buddy program, MeshMates with individuals dedicated to assisting contributors. Layer5 and Meshery have been around for a year and half and have a healthy, growing community of 300+ contributors. The layer5.io website itself is open source and created by 140+ of our contributors.
Technical writers and other contributors are what comprise Layer5 - an open organization, built for the community by the community. Many student contributors have been placed into new jobs with technology companies like Red Hat, Microsoft, and VMware to name a few of the larger organizations. Layer5 expects much from interns and in return, we put them on stage at DockerCon and KubeCon. We promote them and uplift their works. There are many, many examples of this on the layer5.io websites. A number of former interns are now project maintainers.
LFX Mentorship 2021 Project
About the project
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
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 writer 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 number of new Meshery users increases by 20% (currently at ~1,000 users)
Additional information
Previous experience with technical writers or documentation
Our mentors have managed teams of technical writers working on documenting enterprise-grade software at large technology companies (Cisco, Seagate, SolarWinds). During the span of time, he has worked with technical writers in DITA and post-DITA environments (from Word to FrameMaker, structured writing, online help, various CMSes, git). Our mentors have worked with technical writers on documentation strategy, creating document sets, covering the full spectrum of reader personas.
We interact daily over Slack, and have an open source project meeting everyday, which are posted to the community YouTube channel.
