After nearly 7 years of professional technical writing, I’m embarking on my next adventure in Red Hat as the new community lead for the oVirt project.
Those who’ve known me for a while might remember that I have a tendency to reinvent myself every few years. Sleep is overrated.
From my first career as a TV production manager and stage producer, to my second career as a technical writer, I always had absolute commitment to the path I chose but tried to keep an open mind to new directions, and never stopped developing myself.
Now, nearly 7 years after I joined the geeksphere and 2 years after discovering the wonderful world of open source software, I found myself at an interesting crossroads. What started as off-hours activities turned first into a new passion, and now into my third career.
This week I swapped my documentation hat for a community hat (still a red hat!) as the community lead for the Open Virtualization (oVirt) project. oVirt is the FOSS project that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) is based on, and it’s got all the tech (KVM, libvirt, Wildfly, Python, oh my!) as well as a solid user and developer base that I’m looking forward to meet and work with.
This is an unexpected turn of events for me, but I am thrilled to have the opportunity to reboot my organize-all-the-things-and-meet-all-the-people skills in a new context, and although I am transitioning from docs-for-a-living to community-for-a-living, my docs training will surely not go to waste.
Documentation was my first home in IT; where I grew up, so to speak. And you never forget the place where you grew up. So, since I can’t help myself, I will now celebrate this milestone with (you guessed it by now) release notes! For the lolz! Docs or it didn’t happen! Community or it won’t happen!
ThatDocsLady 2.0 Release Notes
ThatDocsLady 2.0 (Community Edition) is based on ThatDocsLady 1.0 (Documentation Edition). It includes major refactoring to existing features, as well as new production-ready features and resolved issues.
Revision History
ThatDocsLady was originally developed as a technical writing solution. The Beta version was released in February 2009 by an Israeli software vendor, and in October 2013 version 1.0 was released to production in Czech Republic as a part of the Red Hat Content Services subscription.
After version 1.0 was released, analytics showed a surprising potential to re-purpose ThatDocsLady for open source community building deployments.
To prepare for version 2.0, ThatDocsLady experienced a major refactoring of skills and knowledge in a development environment while still operating all official features in production. Some features were deprecated to conserve mental resources and to prevent burnout, and the patching mechanism now includes a fail-fast-fix-fast rolling upgrade module.
Since ThatDocsLady 1.0 did not include release notes, the following section lists a summary of production-ready and technical preview features, as well as known issues for version 1.0, to assist with comparison between the two versions and to optimize the upgrade process.
Version 1.0 - October 2013
Supported features
- Technical writing
- Project management
- Agile scrum master
-
Internal stakeholder collaboration
- Perpetual Optimism Module
Technical preview features
- Public speaking (theatre and music edition)
- User feedback integration (customer edition)
- Cross-cultural communication (enterprise edition)
Known issues
- Limited command-line functionality, reverts to GUI
- Only Java and .NET technologies are supported
- Only XML-based documentation is supported
Version 2.0 - September 2015
New features and enhancements
- Open Source Community API (OSC API) provides the following functionality:
- Active listening
- Problem solving
- Event organization
- Public speaking
- Blogging
- Social media
- Empathy
- The following communities are now supported:
- Write the Docs
- Python
- Django
- Fedora
- KDE
- OpenStack
- NixOS
- Django Girls
- Full Git and GitHub integration
- Red Hat OpenStack Administration certification… for da nation
- User feedback integration extended to include the upstream edition
- Cross-cultural communication includes FOSS culture add-on
- Fail-fast-fix-fast rolling upgrade module ensures that new issues will be processed in real-time and new patches will be pushed seamlessly into production
Technical preview features
- oVirt technology (basic implementation, requires further training)
- oVirt community (requires testing with the OSC API)
Deprecated features
- Technical writing
- Agile scrum master
Resolved issues
- Command-line functionality was improved to include bash and Git operations
- Documentation formats now include AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, and Markdown
- Perpetual Optimism Module is now monitored by the cross-cultural communications component and energy levels (should be) stabilized
Known issues
- Geographical location does not support frequent travel, on the roadmap for version 2.1, Prague Edition (to be released December 2015)
- Documentation workshops support is reduced but not deprecated, to be deployed on a case-by-case basis using Write the Docs plug-in
My new roadmap is clear, and I can’t wait to put on my walking shoes and hit the road! I will continue to maintain this blog for my off-hours documentation adventures, but for community posts you might want to check out Red Hat Community News, as I’ll be making most of my noise there.
Yours, That (community) docs lady