Yeah the documentation (if it even exists) of most projects is usually clearly written by people intimately familiar with the project and then never reviewed to make sure it makes sense for people unfamiliar with it. But writing good detailed documentation is also really hard, especially for a specialist because many nontrivial things are trivial to them and they believe what they’re writing is thorough and well explained even though it actually isn’t.
Bold of you to assume I know how to read!
This is why Technical Writer is a full time job.
It’s also why the humanities are important. Stemlords who brag about not doing literature classes write terrible documentation.
My CS major required me to take two upper division English classes and I think they helped me more in my career than my upper division CS classes. People forget that documentation is for ourselves too
Maybe, just maybe, people have different strengths and weaknesses and cooperating around our differences is what makes us succeed.
If you know your weakness is writing documentation, please hire a technical writer.
That’s exactly what I’m saying, sorry if it came across somehow askew.
My point was there is no point in competing over whose job is “better”, we should be working together.
This is why I did a “walkthrough test” when I had to write documentation on this sort of thing. I’m a terrible technical writer, so this shit is necessary for me.
I grabbed my friend who knows enough about computers to attempt this, but not enough about infrastructure to automatically know what I meant when I was too vague.
Took two revisions, but the final document was way easier to follow at the end
“set all environment variables”
More recently its go to discord for the env…no joke.
My face actually dropped when I read this. I will be so mad if I ever encounter this live.
It sucks…and seems to be catching on. Ive seen a quite a few on GitHub that are now referencing using it instead of the issue tracker.
That is so depressing. Literally a markdown file in the repo would be a better issue tracker.
Don’t forget to run your shell over Discord!
This is cursed, but also cool. Hijack another platform for your authentication
That’s why blog posts rock. Most popular projects will have a dozen blog posts for different configurations. For example, when looking to set up NextCloud, I found docs for almost all combinations of the following:
- Apache and Nginx configuration
- running through Docker or directly on the host
- MariaDB and Postgres configs (and SQLite, with proper disclaimers)
- Collabora and OnlyOffice config
It does take some knowledge of each of the above if you need one of the few configs that’s not available on a blog post, and some of the posts are outdated, but with a bit of searching almost everything is documented by someone on the internet.
This shouldn’t be necessary (official docs should be more comprehensive), but at least it’s available.
Okay, please point me to the blog posts that helped you with collabora/onlyoffice. Thanks have NEVER been able to get that to work with my nextcloud (currently using the Docker AIO).
The mistake is the assumption of a certain level of end user knowledge.
You have to assume some level of end user knowledge, otherwise every piece of documentation would start with “What a computer does” and “How to turn your computer on.”
I’ve found the best practice is to list your assumptions at the top of the article with links to more detailed instructions.
I write technical documentation and training materials as part of my job, and the state of most open source documentation makes me want to stab people with an ice pick.
Do you have any tips for writing professional documentation? I want to do some for my workplace but it’s hard to know where to start, how to arrange it, etc
You’re doing God’s work!
Over my career, it’s sad to see how the technical communications groups are the first to get cut because “developers should document their own code”. No, most can’t. Also, the lack of good documentation leads to churn in other areas. It’s difficult to measure it, but for those in the know, it’s painfully obvious.
Do you have some reading recommendations on how to write good documentation, e.g. readmes for end users?
Yes. Here: "1.You aren’t writing an SOP for smart or even capable people., every. Single. Person. Needs their hand held all the way through every step regardless of technical skill. "
“2.if you didnt state it needed to be done in the SOP, it will not be done when the end user follows the SOP”
“3.MAKE someone else run through your SOP without you being involved. If they can successfully achieve what they needed using your SOP > congrats. If not > fix the errors that brought you to this mess.”
“4. Everyone is fucking stupid, be clear, and verbose.” We’re talking about where the start menu is, clicking on the “OK” for prompts, how to spell and type things out.
Change my given values per SOP and what it’s for. But those are my main tenants.
In elemental school we had to write instructions on how to make a pb&j sandwich. The teacher then acted out your instructions literally, without adding or removing a step. I don’t think there was a single sandwich made that day.
Excellent notes. If I could add anything it would be on number 4 – just. add. imagery. For the love of your chosen deity, learn the shortcut for a screenshot on your OS. Use it like it’s astro glide and you’re trying to get a Cadillac into a dog house.
The little red circles or arrows you add in your chosen editing software will do more to convey a point than writing a paragraph on how to get to the right menu.
Absolutely! But I use markdown / Obsidian for my SOPs so images are kinda obnoxious to format. But yes!
This reminds me of when I sent someone a program in a zip folder. Windows now opens zip folders by default, and it looks just like any other folder.
So of course they opened the zip and double clicked the exe, but everyone knows you can’t open an exe inside a zip folder (at least, if the exe depends on the folders and files around it). If you try to, windows will extract the exe into a temp space, but leave all the dependencies behind. So the exe promptly crashes.
I didn’t think I needed to specify “you need to extract the contents of the zip folder first, then run the exe.” It feels like saying “you need to take the blender out of the box before you can use it. And not just the _base _ of the blender, you have to take out all the parts.”
Some things just feel so much like second nature that we forget.
In many ways, the silky-smooth convenience offered by modern computer software makes everything much harder to learn about and understand. For anyone that used zip files before this Windows feature, the problem is obvious - but for younger people it’s not obvious at all. Heck, a lot of people can’t even tell whether or not a file is locally on their computer - let alone whether it is compressed in some other file.
I totally and completely blame Microsoft for this. They do so many other ridiculous things in the name of not confusing the average tech illiterate user.
Clicking a Zip file and having it transparently open and treating it like a regular folder when it is not. This. THIS is borderline criminal.
Propose a better way to browse the contents of a zip folder in a native 1st party way
Have a popup text line in explorer that says “you are browsing inside of a compressed file, you must extract the contents to use them” or something. The functionality is already there, when you go to “network” it says “network sharing and discovery is turned off, click here to turn it on”
The operating system could mount it as a virtual drive, then all its contents could be used directly just like any regular folder.
Imo not really noob-user friendly.
My proposal: Keep current behaviour and make a prompt if the user tries to run an executable. Prompt should be something like “You are trying to open an executable, would you like to extract the whole folder in the current directory?”. This way the user can still browse the zip with relative ease.
Upside from Windows: We have only a handful of extensions unlike (afaik) Linux where everything can be made executable and be run.Imo not really noob-user friendly.
In what way? It would make it entirely invisible that the archive file isn’t just a normal folder, it would be possible to use it just as if it were. What would be unfriendly about that?
Something like this would be helpful:
Perfect.
Protip: Use Conduit instead of Synapse. It’s significantly lighter than Synapse, easier to run, and I guess you can be a cool kid by running something written in Rust. The documentation is even worse though :/ https://conduit.rs/
Matrix and its implementations like Synapse have a very intimidating architecture (I’d go as far as to call most of the implementations somewhat overengineered) and the documentation ranges from inconsistent to horrific. I ran into this particular situation myself, Fortunately this particular step you’re overthinking it. You can use any random string you want. It doesn’t even have to be random, just as long as what you put in the config file matches. It’s basically just a temporary admin password.
Matrix was by far the worst thing I’ve ever tried to self-host. It’s a hot mess. Good luck, I think you’re close to the finish line.
The dankest depths of archlinux wiki. Written by a guy so far gone, so war harden by reading through source code and poorly written technical documentation, ancient forums, leaving no stone unturned. A task so twisted it drives most men crazy.
1% of arch users will ever need this wiki and few have gone through this Herculean task. For them, the first draft is enough, it’s all you can ask of a mind so twisted and broken. Alas it’s as unreadable as the source code and as hard to understand as the forum post from 2009.
Here’s some more of the owl, the official docs: https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/usage/configuration/config_documentation.html#registration_shared_secret
So add this to your matrix config:
registration_shared_secret: <PRIVATE STRING>
I’m guessing this string can be whatever you want it to be.
But yeah, I agree in general, some of the docs can be pretty opaque. For example, I wanted to configure NextCloud w/ Collabora in Docker, and I kept getting errors when trying to do what a few sites recommended. I ended up figuring it out, but only through trial and error. I’m going to go through the same pain this weekend when I try out ownCloud Infinite Scale up and running to compare.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.
[Thread #905 for this sub, first seen 3rd Aug 2024, 13:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Honestly, as a newbie to Linux I think the ratio of well documented processes vs. “draw the rest of the fucking owl” is too damn high.
The rule seems to be that CLI familiarity is treated as though its self-evident. The exception is a ground-up documented process with no assumptions of end user knowledge.
If that could be resolved I think it would make the Linux desktop much more appealing to wider demographics.
That said, I’m proud to say that I’ve migrated my entire home studio over to linux and have not nuked my system yet. Yet… Fortunately I have backups set up.
Linux on the desktop almost never needs CLI interaction though. Maybe you’ll need to copy/paste a command from the internet to fix some sketchy hardware, but almost everything works OOTB these days.
However, self-hosting isn’t a desktop Linux thing, it’s a server Linux thing. You can host it on your desktop, but as soon as you do anything remotely server-related, CLI familiarity is pretty much essential.
That depends on your use case for desktop linux of course. For me, yabridge is the tool I needed to run VSTs on Linux. Its CLI only as far as I know.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not afraid of the CLI. Its just some tools are assuming the end user is a server admin or someone with deeper than the upper crust knowledge of how Linux works.
yabridge
Ah, that’s a pretty niche use-case. But yeah, the deeper you go, the more you’ll have to rely on the CLI.
Step one: use Dendrite instead.
Step two: come back and help me set up my Dendrite instance, it’s definitely not easier.Step one: email must be much easier, I’ll just make an email server instead.
Step two: screw this, I’m writing letters and posting them.
Isn’t running your own SMTP server effectively impossible nowadays?
Running a server is very doable. There are packages to deploy and configure almost everything for you and removing a ton of headache.
Getting your email recognized as not spam by the major providers is pretty much impossible. You need all sorts of stuff to help verify integrity including special DNS records and public identity keys, but even if you do everything right, your mail can very easily get black holed before it even reaches a user’s inbox because of stupid shit like someone abused your rented server’s IP years ago, and you can’t seem to get it off everyone’s lists.
Email as a decentralized tool has effectively been ruined by spam and anti-spam measures. You’re effectively forced to use a provider because it’s near impossible to make your outgoing mail work as an individual. I think some of those anti-spam measures are anticompetitive, but I do think some are just desperate attempts to reduce the massive flow of spam.
It’s not impossible, many people I know and myself successfully self host their email. Yes it’s not trivial, and yes the ip reputation can be annoying to deal with (but it’s possible to cycle to another server to get another ip), but apart from that, if following the best practices (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, proper setup of the mailserver) once it’s set up it can run for years without issue.
To set things straight, I’m not saying that it is easy, but it’s also not impossible, and only giving up will further contribute to centralized email provider monoculture.
Not for everyone, but for those who can, I feel they should.
this is just because it’s webhosted, anything that does anything on the web sucks and is terrible, everything else is actually so much better it’s fucking baffling to me.
web 2.0 is dead to me. web 3.0 won’t get off of the ground, we need web 2 electric boogaloo
2020 called, they want their opinion backI respectfully disagree2002 called*
and yes, they do want their opinion back, because the internet fucking sucks.
If you hate it so much… why are you on it atm?
because there’s also a lot of good stuff on the internet. There was very little on the internet in 2002, and yet people still used it because it was cool. There is a shit ton of information on the internet now, most of which is garbage, and the rest is somewhere between mediocre, or decent, and some of it being genuinely good.
If you hate living, why even bother living? It’s a question of the ages. What’s the point of living if there is no grander purpose? Surely it means nothing, right?
I mean… Bad documentation isn’t specific to selfhosting.
this meme got so much funnier after I realized it was synapse/matrix
Am I the only one in this thread that took this as it’s asking for a clear text credential which is a terrible idea?
A temporary one that you’re expected to remove as soon as you’ve created the admin user(s) you need, but yes. It should only be there during initial setup and ideally removed before the server is ever exposed to the internet.
Docker
There’s your first mistake.
Oh, hi, I’m just stopping by from the ‘compile from source and create a systemd unit file’ tribe.
I used to try and compile from source first. Was good experience. Don’t see why I should bother now, though 🤣
