My First Solo Project

My first solo project was in documentation. I had been working on fixing up documentation errors that were present on GitHub issues, when I got ready to tackle two large issues: the creation of documentation and coding guidelines for TARDIS.

This was a large step up in importance, as I would be setting guidelines for how all code past and future should be written. It would also make it so that documentation issues like the ones I had been working on for the past month wouldn’t be repeated. It would also have an impact on everyone using TARDIS, so what I created had to be good and concise.

This task was a lot different from my previous tasks. Instead of fixing well-defined issues, I had to make guidelines to try and prevent any other issues and answer questions as to how code should be written and formatted in the future. This task made me learn a lot more about code creation in general, as well as the syntax rules around coding in Python. The tool Black, which is a PEP8 compliant opinionated code formatter, was chosen to format the code automatically. Naming conventions and docstrings were also covered, with an example and explanation of each aspect of the conventions used.

I started and finished this myself, but as this is such a large and important piece I also got introduced to a new mentor, Jaladh, who helped proofread and expand upon my documentation, adding guidelines for exception handling which I had never considered. The final piece of this was to create instructions for how to build documentation locally so that anyone working on TARDIS can test to see how pages will be built without having to do commits. This led to more exploration into reStructuredText and made checking and fixing documentation and files a lot easier.

This was the first big project that I was given the lead on, and I am very confident in the results. I do very well with clear instructions and goals, so this project was outside of my comfort zone due to that and the importance of it. You can read the documentation guidelines that I wrote here.